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Re: %HOME% on Win32 (Re: ra_dav compression question)

From: Branko Čibej <brane_at_xbc.nu>
Date: 2003-06-23 09:42:12 CEST

Chris Hecker wrote:

>
>> > PPS. Special bonus question that I haven't had time to look in the
>> > source to answer: for the Win32 client, is there any way to use the
>> > %HOME%\.subversion directory rather than \Documents and Settings\blah
>> > blah blah\Subverion directory.
>> No. How many points do I get for this answer? :-)
>
>
> How many points you get depends on which "no" it is. Is that "no" as
> in "no, that's not currently possible but if somebody wrote the
> code...", or "no" as in "we will absolutely never consider such a
> feature"? :) If it's the former I'd be happy to submit a patch and
> you get full points.

Heh. Whatever gets me more points, then. :-)

> Putting per-user settings in %APPADATA%\Subversion is simply following
>
>> the Windows conventions, same as putting them in ~/.subversion is
>> following the Unix conventions. It's also necessary to do so if you want
>> the SVN settings to work correctly with roaming profiles and such.
>
>
> Sure, but there are a zillion other command line tools that use %HOME%
> (many many more than use the Windows conventions, like emacs, cvs,
> cygwin tools, openssl, etc...all unix ports, to be sure,

Exactly. Unix ports. Subversion on Windows is _not_ a Unix port, believe
it or not.

> but also highly correlated with commandline source code control tool
> use as well, I'd assume), so I claim giving people the option to use
> %HOME% if they choose is the right thing. Anybody who goes and toasts
> their %APPDATA%\Subversion directory and also has a %HOME%\.subversion
> directory is already making a choice to manage their user information
> themselves.

You can already change your %APPDATA% setting to, say, a subdirectory of
your %HOME%. So you can get almost exactly what you want without
changing a single line of SVN code.

> Or, another alternative is having a %SVNHOME% envvar, and the Win32
> default install can stuff it with %APPDATA% (like it does with the
> APR_ICONV_PATH)

APR_ICONV_PATH is not a Subversion thing, it's an apr-iconv thing, and
(unfortunately) necessary.

> and users who want to can change it. I think silently testing
> existence on %APPDATA%\Subversion and %HOME%\.subversion is better
> than yet another environment variable,

Absolutely, adding new environment variables is horrible. Note that
%HOME% is not a standard env. var on Windows, so you're proposing a
"new" variable in any case. :-)

However, Subversion also _creates_ that directory; how does it know
which you prefer?

> but either way is fine with me as long as it's possible to put the
> configs in %HOME%\.subversion. Or, how about following a link if
> %APPDATA%\Subversion is a .lnk. Lots of possibilities.

That won't work, .lnk files are handled by the Explorer, not the
filesystem. However, on Win2k and above, you can make
%APPDATA%\Subversion a junction to anywhere you like -- again, not
having to change a single line of code in SVN.

I think a bit of documentation on the things you can already do -- i.e.,
move %APPDATA% or make a junction -- would be the best solution here. We
really don't want to complicate the configuration code more than it is
already.

-- 
Brane Čibej   <brane_at_xbc.nu>   http://www.xbc.nu/brane/
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Received on Mon Jun 23 09:43:04 2003

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