Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] change location of preferences dir '.etherea l' on W2K
On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 10:43:43AM +0200, Buhler, Roland wrote:
> Hi,
> because I've started this discussion I would give another hint.
> GIMP for win is working the same way - storing the dir "_gimp1.2" in the
> "home directory" and no way to change that while installing gimp.
> But gimp has the possibility to set the var "GIMP_DIRECTORY" to something
> else where to look for this homedir.
>
> Perhaps this is an easy and feasible solution.
It may be easy and feasible, but the question is whether it's the
*right* solution. It may have been a transplanted-from-UNIX solution
that didn't take into account the fact that Windows appears to have two
separate directories that take on some of the nature of a UNIX home
directory - the network "home directory" (which appears to have to be
explicitly set when you create a new account, and which appears to
default, in effect, to "C:\", which is *not* a personal directory) and
the user profile directory (which *is* a per-user personal directory -
and which is on the local machine).
As the "home directory" isn't set by default, putting per-user files
such as the ".ethereal" directory seems not to be what Ethereal should
do by default; the user profile directory, *if* the OS supplies it,
should be the right place to put the per-user settings.
On NT, that should rarely, if ever, have to be overridden.
If, on Windows 9x/ME, USERPROFILE isn't set, we could offer an option
where if ETHEREAL_DIRECTORY is set, we look there, but if it's not set,
we use USERPROFILE if it's set and "C:\" if it's not.
