Re: Shipping Windows binary applications

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 28 Feb 2007, at 16:00, Nicola Pero wrote:

>  1. the alert panel asking you to set your 'Server Preferences' is  
> very annoying and very unprofessional.  I keep getting it any time  
> I change something and it's horrid. :-(

I *think* it used to open the server preferences panel rather than  
pop up an alert panel ... not sure why that's happening.
Also, it should only happen first time ... so if it keeps happening  
then there is a bug somewhere.

> Obviously the default on Windows should be using the Windows  
> taskbar and using Windows window
> decorations!

matter of opinion :-)

> , with the 'WindowMaker' way of doing things being triggered only  
> by advanced users
> who tweak their user defaults manually.  Is it OK if I remove this  
> panel and make the Windows
> behaviour the default ? :-)


>  2. NSTask generates an alert (and crashes the program) saying it  
> can't start './gdnc'.  I
> imagine that path is used since gnustep-base.dll and gdnc.exe are  
> in the same directory ?
> But then NSTask would interpret it relatively to the current  
> directory, so it wouldn't find
> './gdnc' ?  Anyway, I guess I can fix that. :-)

I guess a bug has been introduced by recent changes ... it used to  
get the paths right.  There was code (which definitely worked) in  
NSPathUtilities.m to map a path with a './' prefix to be relative to  
the location of the GNUstep.conf file.

>  3. gdnc.exe and gpbs.exe are quite annoying in general.  When you  
> have your standalone application on a USB flash disk, the app  
> starts nicely, and it automatically starts gdnc.exe and gpbs.exe.   
> Cool.
>
> Unfortunately, when you quit the application, they keep running.   
> If you now try removing the
> USB flash disk, Windows doesn't let you, because it can't unmount a  
> flash disk from which
> programs are running.  The average user would definitely be stuck  
> at that point since you
> have no clue about which programs are running from the USB disk  
> (they are not visible anywhere
> that an average user can see).  Not sure how to fix the problem.

Well I suppose we could have an option to have them exit when nothing  
is connected to them...
We probably should do that whenever one of them is launched  
automatically by an app.