Re: [Monotone-devel] bug report ver 0.16, on windows

[Jon Bright]

Hi,

Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> Man, what a mess.

Yup.

> AFAICT, there is no right answer.  USERPROFILE and HOMEDRIVE/HOMEPATH
> mean two different things.

From what I can tell from the Sun URL, USERPROFILE more closely fits 
what we want, leaving HOMEDRIVE/HOMEPATH as a fallback.

> http://www.ethereal.com/lists/ethereal-users/200108/msg00183.html
> seems to argue that USERPROFILE is the one we want, but, eh, the whole
> system doesn't make much sense...

I think we're basically looking at 18 years of backwards-compatibility 
cruft from the outside.

> I've just implemented:
>   1) if MONOTONE_HOME is defined, use it
>   2) if HOME is defined, use it
>   3) if USERPROFILE is defined, use it
>   4) if HOMEDRIVE+HOMEPATH are defined, use them
>   5) whine at user
>
> Is that good enough to make people happy?

Not quite.  I'm of the opinion that 2) should be:

2) if (HOME is defined) and (OSTYPE is defined and =="msys" || 
=="cygwin"), use $HOME

If you're in a normal Windows shell, HOME has (afaict) no special 
meaning - but it's a common enough name that it might be defined for 
other reasons.  For both Cygwin and MinGW, HOME has the normal-to-Unix 
special meaning.  My argument would be, if you're a plain Windows user 
who doesn't know nothing about this fancy Unix stuff, you want 
USERPROFILE treated as your home.  If you're one of those smart, 
sophisticated Cygwin/MinGW users, you want your Cygwin/MinGW home dir used.

--
Jon Bright
Silicon Circus Ltd.
http://www.siliconcircus.com