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From: papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Amiga Roadblocks to User Friendliness
Message-ID: <13951@oberon.USC.EDU>
Date: 12 Dec 88 18:47:27 GMT
References: <8812091849.AA02843@cloud9.berkeley.edu> <5486@cbmvax.UUCP>
Sender: news@oberon.USC.EDU
Reply-To: papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa)
Organization: Felsina Software, Los Angeles, CA
Lines: 31

In article <5486@cbmvax.UUCP| jesup@cbmvax.UUCP (Randell Jesup) writes:
|In article <8812091849.AA02843@cloud9.berkeley.edu| dillon@CLOUD9.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon) writes:
||:1. make sure commercial applications never need boot time configurations
||:such as ASSIGN or PATH?  
|
|	There is a better solution, which I used in Sub Battle Simulator.
|Everytime I need to open a file, I call MyOpen(file,mode).  MyOpen first
|tries an open relative to the current directory, then it tries with
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
|the diskname (assignname) on the front.  This makes the program run on a
|harddisk with no assigns needed, from WB or CLI, even if you're in a different
|directory (though for a different directory it needs the assign).

As I said I concur with this.  I used it in A-Talk III, and it does the job.
The trick is to just write your installation script and use Xicon to execute
it.  Ask one (1) question to the user:

On which disk (or volume) do you want to install package XXX?

Then copy the XXX executable and copy subdirectories/drawers RELATIVE to
the same location on the disk.  Then use MyOpen() as Randell describes above
and the end result is that the "dumb hd user" has to click on 1 icon, and 
answer 1 question to get package XXX properly usable from a hard disk.

Is that easy enough?

-- Marco Papa 'Doc'
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