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RE: setup size prefs


Brian D. AKA ******-apps-owner@*y*w*n.com wrote:
> Hannu E K Nevalainen wrote:
>
>>  Windows style isn't always the best. Cygwin isn't much "Windows" in
>> other ways, why should it be in this regard?
>
> Inventing things to get around windows design is poor practice.  When
> the operating system provides well-defined and documented ways for
> storing program settings you should use them, not litter the
> filesystem with config files because you have some unfounded
> perception that the registry is evil.

 Practical experience has never been "unfounded". I'd say that is knowledge
earned the hard way.
 And I was not asking for anything else than what there always was; just
moving it around, allowinging to use it in a way that opened up
possibilities - for the time beeing. Call it an interim solution to a well
known and often discussed problem (i.e. unattended installs).

> Setup is an odd example
> because it has to know both about the windows idioms and the posix
> idioms.  However, it's a pure windows program and its own settings
> (those that no cygwin/posix app would really ever need to know or
> care about) should be saved in the same way all well-behaived windows
> programs do it.
>
>> If something is "brain dead" I'd say that keeping ALL "INI-files"
>> (e.g the registry, fonts and whatnot) in memory at once is;
>>  I have no facts to backup this, but this is how I "feel" that
>> Windows behaves - given less than a certain amount of memory. [W98:
>> 128MB, W2K: 256MB, XP: 512MB(?) - the lowest amounts of RAM to make
>>  the machine usable.] Example: Install a few thousand fonts and
>> realise that you need to increase the amount of available RAM by a
>> constant times the number of fonts. Before you do, you can't go on
>> using your machine as you're used to. And this is before you even
>> attempt to access any font.
>
> Where to begin... your beef about fonts has nothing to do with the
> registry.  Older 9x windows had to load all installed fonts into
> memory at startup, but that is not the case with NT based versions,
> IIRC.

 Find yourself an old copy of Corel Draw 8 or some such, (huge amount of
fonts available) and try it out. Given a certain amount of free time I might
end up doing that myself as I have it available.

>  And there is nothing that says the entire registry hive(s)
> must be in memory.  Windows' virtual memory manager that will page
> out pages that have not been used recently.  If you really want to
> prove this then go add dozens of MB of random stuff to some key in
> the registry and watch the memory usage of all running tasks.
> NOthing changes, unless some app actually tries to access those keys.

 No need to wiggle the registry; I've periodically had problems with the
diskcache in the Win2K advanced server copy I run (on a P2/450MHz w 256MB
RAM). The cache eats all available RAM. Running "cacheset" from
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml
has proven to lessen the problems.

>>> If you really want to be able to programmatically do that, just
>>> use regtool.  e.g. "regtool set HKLM\Software\Cygwin setup\height
>>> 480". Don't go do something outside of the OS's idioms for how
>>> program settings are to be stored.  That's bad programming.
>>
>>  ... and how do you use regtool? The man page, webhelp nor help
>> output does contain a single example that works.
>>  And then: BEFORE you've installed Cygwin it is HARD to use regtool.
>
> Documentation is a seperate issue.  Both an .ini file format and
> registry keys will need to be documented, otherwise they would not be
> easy to set.  Neither of them is intuitive.

Agreed...

>  But that's okay, because
> 99.99% of setup users don't have a need or a care to do what you're
> trying to do.  They just want to be able to resize the program and
> have the size remembered next time.

 ...and you're content at this level? Well, that is your choice.

In general terms though: Pushing the limits has always proven to be
worthwhile. There is always something "good" popping up; if nothin else then
some insight.

> The need to preset defined sizes to setup before running it just seems
> like a corner-case feature, not something that should be specifically
> designed around.  If the settings are stored in the registry then you
> can just make a .reg file with the desired settings and use regedit to
> merge them into the registry - no Cygwin tools involved, and it can be
> automated.  Or you could add command line switches to allow the user
> to override (replace) the size/position settings in the registry.

> Just please don't go littering the user's hard drive with deprecated
> .ini files.

 Though not beeing .ini files, the cygwin install procedure "litters the
users hard drive" with a substantial amount of files at install. This time
it would just make one of them MOVE (also adding to its content) though.
Even if it wasn't the case; One more or less wouldn't make much difference,
if it added some useful possibilities.

> Brian

/Hannu E K Nevalainen, B.Sc. EE Microcomputer systems            --72-->

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