Brian D. AKA [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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--> ** mailing list preference; please keep replies on list ** -- printf("LocalTime: UTC+%02d\n",(DST)? 2:1); -- --END OF MESSAGE--
