ReactOS Forum

Hy,

eehhmm... the movi : "The Story of Silicon Vally"

no change... !

greetingz
Blacky

Haos wrote:Floyd: besides stability, our second main goal is compatibility. Certain names/paths/keys are hardcoded in Windows NT, thus apps/drivers will expect those. This limits number of things that we could possibly change. Compatibilty itself is an important reason to stick closely to Windows. At least for now...

actually that's not true.

most of those paths are environment variables which you can change or set by the registry. also, there is the alternate part of using aliases like vista does (and *nix OSes have done for years). for example, %windir% is a variable that most programs use, it just happens to (usually) be .\WINDOWS. some poorly written programs hard code these paths (usually because people are ignorant of the fact that windows actually uses pathing variables), but if you watch closely almost NO MS app uses a hard coded path (a default installation path is different, and they probably lookup the environmental variables most of the time anyway), they almost always use the system variables.

here is a list of system variables:
http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/environment.htm

go to the top-level of a dos prompt (C:\)
type "cd %windir%" and it will take you to .\WINDOWS
point proven.

about the only thing hard-coded into windows is the location of boot.ini, ntldr and ntoskrnl.exe (and possibly the location of the registry; but that would be set at time of system installation because you can move and rename the .\WINDOWS directory).

Floyd wrote: about the only thing hard-coded into windows is the location of boot.ini, ntldr and ntoskrnl.exe (and possibly the location of the registry; but that would be set at time of system installation because you can move and rename the .\WINDOWS directory).

Not even that:

ntldr is on the main boot partition, which can be any other partition than the one Windows is installed of. Right now, my ntldr is on a different physical partition than my Windows installation.

ntoskrnl.exe resides in %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\, and ntldr knows its location by this little ARC path:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

mf wrote:

Floyd wrote: about the only thing hard-coded into windows is the location of boot.ini, ntldr and ntoskrnl.exe (and possibly the location of the registry; but that would be set at time of system installation because you can move and rename the .\WINDOWS directory).

Not even that:

ntldr is on the main boot partition, which can be any other partition than the one Windows is installed of. Right now, my ntldr is on a different physical partition than my Windows installation.

ntoskrnl.exe resides in %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\, and ntldr knows its location by this little ARC path:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

i couldn't remember off of the top of my head which files needed a certain path so i played it conservatively. but the gist of the point got across.

Hardcoding is less prevalent today, but certain apps have used it in the past, including ones for NT. Case in point, Photoshop seemed to demand installation onto the C:\ drive no matter what.

Issue itself: Ignore it, i say. Really, ReactOS does nothing wrong and only a corrupt legal system could consider it illegal... Oh, i live in the US, So it probably is.

About how closely we followed: This project is all about compatibility. And did you know that most copy protection links directly to the kernel to load a driver?

Z98 wrote:Hardcoding is less prevalent today, but certain apps have used it in the past, including ones for NT. Case in point, Photoshop seemed to demand installation onto the C:\ drive no matter what.

yeah, i still think hard-coding is a bad idea.

Z98 wrote:Hardcoding is less prevalent today, but certain apps have used it in the past, including ones for NT. Case in point, Photoshop seemed to demand installation onto the C:\ drive no matter what.

What version? I've always had Photoshop 4 and 5.5 on D:\, and some subsequent versions like 7 and CS1, too.

Really? I think it was an Adobe product. There's a tool designed to let you move installed programs around, but apparently it fails to work if you try moving an Adobe program from C to D.

You don't need a tool to move programs around, I used Windows Explorer to move all the versions of Photoshop around I have seen.

The ROS people don't violate patents. Thus we are OK.

Heh, that's what you think.

What's that I here? .

Well, personally i don't like the MS-Win software installation approach; i'm an Haiku fan and i like their approach: unzip'n'run. No installation.

WAAAYS better !

Too rewind chaotic thread to the issue of Hard Coding

Clearly a lot of windows programs don't use hardcoding, since MS have been able to change things around quite easily

Example

9x: C:\windows\profiles
XP: C:\Documents and Settings\
Vista: C:\Users\

This was mainly accomplishable due to the Shell and Enviroment variables system (try typing shell:systemX86 or shell:personal into windows explorer) On top of this under vista C:\Documents and Settings is a hidden symlink to C:\Users

Symlinks are a concept that should be familiar to any *nix admnistrator, for windows heads lets just say that the operating system quietly -redirects- any file access at that point to the desired location. Support for them was added in Vista - Methinks it would be wise to add them to ReactOS