Making a project "standalone"? Configuriung it as well?

[maseter]

But why bring up write protection? Nobody is setting it to nor does portable imply write protected.

[wildweasel]

But why bring up write protection? Nobody is setting it to nor does portable imply write protected.

Program Files has implied write-protection in recent versions of Windows, except under specific circumstances (i.e. installing new applications). It's part of Windows' attempts to be more secure, though in practice all it really does is add confusion.

[InsanityBringer]

I believe at one point (there still might be but I haven't heard of it) there was a "virtual folder" concept where when things tried to write to Program Files without administrator privilege, the write would silently be redirected to a user folder, which under ideal circumstances the program would see as the actual folder. This did have some weird issues in practice.

[Graf Zahl]

But why bring up write protection? Nobody is setting it to nor does portable imply write protected.

Program Files has implied write-protection in recent versions of Windows, except under specific circumstances (i.e. installing new applications). It's part of Windows' attempts to be more secure, though in practice all it really does is add confusion.

So,under Windows it adds confusion, but under Linux it's good practice to write protect critical stuff? The main reason for this is that some badly behaved software can't trash your installed programs and you can bet that, if this wasn't the case, some malware would happily trash that stuff.

(Of course, it can still get bad if some software does not run without its app data present in write enabled directories. Any good program should be able to recreate these but I've seen it more than once that they just crashed instead of just resetting it to a base state.)

[wildweasel]

Well, considering the number of software glitches I've seen that all spawned from the program being run out of Program Files (saved games not being properly read and located, etc), I'm basically inclined to never, ever install things into it unless I have no choice.