by JPL » Tue May 28, 2019 4:57 pm
Enjay wrote:Gah! the spectre of possibly yet more stuff being written to remote places on my HD gives me chills. I get that it is the current way to do things and it might even be for good reasons (e.g. perhaps security as suggested) but I find it horribly unintuitive for programs that I have deliberately chosen the location of to suddenly write files somewhere entirely different in a directory that they have created in a folder that the OS likes to pretend is somewhere else in the first place and clutter up my user directory to boot. I have always despised these fake/virtual/multi-user folders in Windows ever since they first started appearing. I like to know where stuff really is and I like stuff to be where I put it.
Mind you, I cut my computing teeth making directories in DOS and not having any of these new fangled user directories and so on, so things were always just where I put them and nowhere else. So, maybe it's just that there is a problem between my keyboard and my chair (specifically, that particular component being outdated).
Windows is actually kind of an outlier in that regard, in all UNIX-derived OSes (Mac OS X, Linux) an application's install directory and where it is allowed to write data to are kept deliberately separate. This has the advantage of keeping programs where every user can access them, and user data in a place that's easy to back up; if I install a new Linux distro I can leave my /home partition where it is and reinstall the entire OS and programs and everything works exactly as before. Whereas when I set up a new Windows system I have to re-download all the third party software I use (because Windows also lacks a package manager) and then re-configure every single application, unless it's easy to copy over config files and assuming the software doesn't use the registry for configuration.
More recent versions of Windows seem to enforce some sort of access control when writing to c:\Program Files\, mainly for security reasons. I guess ZDoom/GZDoom has avoided having to grapple with any of this by never having an installer. (Not that installers don't bring their own weird issues.)
[quote="Enjay"]Gah! the spectre of possibly yet more stuff being written to remote places on my HD gives me chills. I get that it is the current way to do things and it might even be for good reasons (e.g. perhaps security as suggested) but I find it horribly unintuitive for programs that I have deliberately chosen the location of to suddenly write files somewhere entirely different in a directory that they have created in a folder that the OS likes to pretend is somewhere else in the first place and clutter up my user directory to boot. I have always despised these fake/virtual/multi-user folders in Windows ever since they first started appearing. I like to know where stuff really is and I like stuff to be where I put it.
Mind you, I cut my computing teeth making directories in DOS and not having any of these new fangled user directories and so on, so things were always just where I put them and nowhere else. So, maybe it's just that there is a problem between my keyboard and my chair (specifically, that particular component being outdated). :P[/quote]
Windows is actually kind of an outlier in that regard, in all UNIX-derived OSes (Mac OS X, Linux) an application's install directory and where it is allowed to write data to are kept deliberately separate. This has the advantage of keeping programs where every user can access them, and user data in a place that's easy to back up; if I install a new Linux distro I can leave my /home partition where it is and reinstall the entire OS and programs and everything works exactly as before. Whereas when I set up a new Windows system I have to re-download all the third party software I use (because Windows also lacks a package manager) and then re-configure every single application, unless it's easy to copy over config files and assuming the software doesn't use the registry for configuration.
More recent versions of Windows seem to enforce some sort of access control when writing to c:\Program Files\, mainly for security reasons. I guess ZDoom/GZDoom has avoided having to grapple with any of this by never having an installer. (Not that installers don't bring their own weird issues.)