Re: Installation on windows (fwd)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

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On 2005-03-14 19:43:01 +0000 Alex Perez <address@hidden> wrote:

> Nicola Pero wrote:
> >
here are currently issues with the path handling
> > > which causes certain things to only work inside the msys environment. If 
> > > you remove it before those issues are fixed, you will introduce more 
> > > problems.
> >
> >
> > Thanks -- ... there might be some confusion ? ;-) ... we are talking of
> > the msys developer toolkit (ie, additional developer tools), not of msys
> > (the base development environment).
> >
> > Anyway.  Which issues ?  Which path handling ? :-)
>
> Unicode path handling under win32 is basically completely broken. I am not 
> privy to the details, but all I can say for sure is that I believe it 
> manifests itself as a problem when you launch a gpbs or gdnc (which are 
> both 
> true GNUstep tools, unlike gdomap, which AFAIR is a C app) from a path with 
> a 
> space in it, it fails miserably. This should not happen. Windows is riddled 
> with paths with spaces, and they must be properly supported. I understand 
> the 
> inherent limitations of GNU Make and GNUstep-make and spaces, but this is 
> not 
> what I am referring to. GNUstep apps at runtime should have 100% support 
> for 
> being launched in a directory with spaces, as well as opening files up in 
> directories with spaces. The current installer "works around" this problem 
> by 
> installing GNUstep to c:\GNUstep, which is in violation of the Windows FSH, 
> but it's the only solution that currently works without fixing the problem 
> with win32 path handling properly and completely.

To the best of my knowledge, the problem with launching apps in paths
containing a space was fixed about a month ago, and was due to a
bug/feature of the way that windows deals with the arguments when spawning a
subprocess ... it had nothing to do with unicode string handling.
Certainly, I can run gdnc from directories whose names contain spaces.
Also, I have never heard of gnustep having any problem opening files whose
names contain spaces.  Which is not to say that there can't be problems
where application programmers parse strings assuming that spaces are being
used as filename separators.
Anyway, there are no outstanding unfixed bug reports on the issue of spaces
in the base library, and no windows specific bug reports for unicode
problems that I can remember at all.

> > Let's fix them if we have any.
>
> Sheldon Gill knows probably better than anyone else what needs to be done 
> to 
> resolve this. I suggest you send him an e-mail, since I don't think he's 
> subscribed to this list currently. I've been discussing various aspects of 
> win32 gnustep issues with him privately recently, and he knows far more 
> about 
> it than I'd ever care to know :) You can contact him at 
> address@hidden , or if he is lurking on the list reading this, I'd 
> like to encourage him to come out of his hole and speak to this :)

It's definitely worth checking with Sheldon in case he knows of any bugs he
hasn't bothered to report ... though my impression was that most of his
problems were wishes that things would work more 'naturally' in a windows
environment rather than bugs as such, and I think most/all of the ideas
discussed with him have been applied by Adam recently.
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