Re: [AD] Magic main in Windows

[Chris <kcat@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Daniel Schlyder wrote:
> Hum, I don't understand why you mention the command line. All the novice PC
> users I've helped set up computers for, heavily used the "My Documents" folder.
> It's one of the top items in Explorer and on the Start menu.

Besides having a folder called "My Documents" holding game data and 
config info (a misnomer if I ever saw one), it adds nothing but 
confusion. Like if a game says to edit the config file, one would 
obviously ask.. "Where's the config file?" It'd be a lot easier and 
simpler to say "where you extracted the program" than "look in 
C:\Documents and Settings\<your user name>\My Documents\Application 
Data\(program name)". Microsoft should be shot for having a directory 
structure like that. Of course it doesn't help that most Windows users 
don't even know that that's partly the same as clicking My Documents in 
the start menu.

> Please don't blow this out of proportions. It takes about five minutes to
> create a professionally looking installer using, for example, Inno Setup, and I
> don't see how it could possibly confuse the end user. To the contrary, I would
> think most of them would prefer an installer to an archive that they might not
> know how to unpack, or where to, or what to do next.

Windows users might prefer installers so that it hides the nitty gritty 
details that it's throwing files around every which way, but as a Linux 
user, I personally don't like installers for that very reason (besides 
being plain uncommon). If something goes wrong and I need to uninstall 
it, I'd like to be able to just run 'rm -rf <directory>'.. not another 
program given by the possibly buggy installer/main program and hope it 
doesn't choke on something. It's also very counter-intuitive to do for 
source distributions.

That's not to say I think installers are inherently bad. I just think 
that having an (un)installer is a poor reason to be able to throw files 
anywhere on the drive.

- Kitty Cat