Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!POSTGRES.BERKELEY.EDU!dillon
From: dillon@POSTGRES.BERKELEY.EDU (Matt Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: How applications can autoinstall (a little long)
Message-ID: <8812180239.AA22378@postgres.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 18 Dec 88 02:39:47 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Lines: 26

:     The problem I see in this discussion of s:Startup-Assigns is I don't
:want the assignments hanging around indefinitely.  For one thing, another
:application might use the same logical device name.  So when I start an

	Well, assigns don't really take up *that* much memory.  Apart from
the problem you mentioned of duplication of names by different applications,
which will be a very minor problem, there really is no reason not to have
them all assign'd at startup.  If you rez assign actual execution of even
several dozen will be fast.  I myself have 50 custom assigns in mine.

:     Of course, the foregoing doesn't solve the problem of how to oopy an
:application to your hard disk and have the assign statements in the script
:files changed automatically.  But I guess you could write a script file
:that would copy all the application's files to a directory name specified
:as a parameter.  Then it could write a StartApplication script file using
:that same directory.

	You would need a standard install program, or the install program
that comes with the application, which would *modify* the assigns if they
already exist in s:startup-assigns, or *add* them if they do not already
exist.  This is extremely trivial to write, and all the user would have
to do is click on an 'install' icon.  Or, even better, you could build it
into the application ... it simply checks to see if the executable is 
where the assign says it is and if not, re-install the assigns.

						-Matt