Acorn User 3/AUCD3.iso/airport/browsers/acornet/archive/archive897/000107_owner-acornet@…s.barnet.ac.uk _Thu Aug 21 20:34:43 1997.msg

Internet Message Format | 1997-08-28 | 4KB

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Date: Thu, 21 Aug 1997 19:29:29 +0100
From: Joseph Heenan <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Acornet 0.20 - a few problems?
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In message <[e-mail]>
          Michael Cowgill <[e-mail]> wrote:

> I've always been unhappy about the way Acorent forces applications
> to run from inside itself: The whole ethos of having Alias$Dir
> system variables is so that the system knows where to find things.

There's good reason for it, though.
Would you want acornet's behaviour to change depending on whether or
not you'd opened some other directories on your computer first?

Having two copies of any application on your computer is just asking
for trouble, surely?

> Acornet's method also makes it more difficult to upgrade
> applications, as you have to go ferreting around in layers of
> directories - I don't know about you, but I always keep the old
> version for a few weeks until I'm sure the new version isn't
> bugged.

I do the same. I don't think there'd be a problem with creating a
subdirectory old of !Acornet.apps (or whatever) and stick old
applications in there.

> I also don't like the fact that !WebCache and !NewsDir,
> which it is quite often necessary to access are relatively
> inaccessible.

There shouldn't be a problem with moving !WebCache out of Acornet.
Moving !NewsDir, on the other hand, would cause bootapps to die...

> I would propose a simple Obey file which simply sets up Alias$Dir
> variables for those Acornet applications not already seen by the
> filer.

You'd also have to actually boot the applications, otherwise you
could have an application running, open a directory containing
another copy of it, and find that your running application really
doesn't appreciate it's path being changed whilst it's running.

I really don't think this is the solution though. If you want to keep
copies of applications elsewhere, just delete the acornet copies (or
move them to somewhere harmless, like !acornet.apps.unused).
The only problem with this is various bits of acornet won't be happy
with this - bootapps, for example, doesn't currently like you moving
!newsdir. This should be simple to fix, though. !FrontEnd uses
absolute paths to applications, and would have to be changed to use
the <xxxx$dir> versions, and !NetConfig would have to be changed as
noted below.

Have I missed something? What do people think of this?

> This would also stop the configure application from crashing
> when an application isn't where it is expected.

I haven't looked at the configure application, but it really
shouldn't crash if it can't find an application. It should possibly
pause, till the user application 'xxxx' couldn't be found, and hence
can't be configured, and then carry on with the others.
(Does someone want to do this? :-) )

Joseph

--
Joseph Heenan, Coventry, UK
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