Hi, > ROOT team asked a help to CREATE the proper distribution, Actually I understood your message to be saying that you (as one of the primary authors) intended to do it: > That's strange. I wonder one should ask that setup author to adjust > things rather calling some expert word-wide. so I actually avoided any suggestion of doing it myself for fear of giving offense. As I said, I am glad to try if it is needed and I will not be duplicating work done by you or others. > MS installer is indeed integrated into the LAST versions of Windows > OS's. It doesn't help much for Windows 95 users for example since that > system has NO registry entry to hold the evironment variables. For > Window 95 one has to edit the autoexec.bat instead. Yes, I guess you're right about that. But fortunately (according to the documentation for Windows Installer), it is smart enough to modify environment variables in the registry for WinNT/2K and modify autoexec.bat for Win9x. > You said you had learned "Installer". That's good, please share your > skill with the rest ROOT community in the form of the proper > "procedure" to create the good ROOT distribution kit good for all > Microsoft operating systems. I don't have access to any machines running Win9x or WinMe, so it would be difficult for me to test on the older (consumer) Windows systems. But since the tricky part appears to be the environment variables, and Windows Installer is supposed to handle the Win9x/NT differences transparently, it should be possible in principle. The other problem with the older versions is that they do not come with Windows Installer, so some people would need to install the installer before installing Root. The Windows Installer is treated as an operating system facility which reads data from the installation kit, rather than a standalone executable like Installshield. I assume, but don't know for a fact, that a version of Root compiled on Windows 2K will run on Windows 95. This should normally be the case, but the two operating systems are only 99.5% compatible, not necessarily 100%. > However the key problem is still there. It is the UNIX nature of > the ROOT executable and ROOT distribution. It relies on the > environment variables. This is Ok for UNIX. > However the right "Windows" appication should rely on the > registry entries and should avoid > using the environment variable at all. No "installation" tool can > help resolving > this key point. And this is where the ROOT team needs some kind > of the contribution > from the Windows part of the ROOT community. You are right, of course, but my feeling is that we are probably stuck with environment variables anyway. Even if Root is modified to do things the "right" way, we (or I at least) am still stuck with GEANT4, CLHEP, PAW etc which also rely on environment variables ala Unix. And it is much harder to convince the maintainers of CLHEP and GEANT4 to change things than the more flexible and less formal Root team. I would think Windows users will be migrating to Win2K over the not too distant future, and environment variables are not the worst problem confronting Root on the Windows platform. Until the GUI works in way which crashes less than once every 2-3 operations, it is very difficult to consider Windows a truly supported platform. If I were to commit to any significant amount of effort, it would seem more important to attack this problem. I will be coming to CERN in February for three months, so I hope to become better acquainted with Rene and Fons and perhaps find out if I can do to help with the GUI problems. Dave dcasper@uci.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 01 2002 - 17:50:34 MET