At 08:26 PM 09/19/02 -0700, SRE wrote:
>I ran swish-e-2.2-win32.exe, and like others have reported
>it sort of drops you on the floor when it's finished. None
>of the standard Windoze messages about being done, rebooting,
>or where to locate shortcuts.

Yes, isn't that refreshing!  Maybe we should require rebooting just to make
it seem like an official Windows program? ;)

>That's OK, but a final message
>where to look next would really comfort the average user.

Don't Windows users know to look at the programs off the start menu?

>I do have a problem, however, with files like README.txt
>*not* actually being a text file. They're Unix linefeed
>terminated, not Windoze CRLF line terminated. That means
>you can't view any of the readme files in NotePad (which
>is what pops up when you double click on a .txt file).

We discussed this a bit.  maybe that can be fixed.  Do people really use
Notepad?  If nothing else, drag it into your browser.


>Worse, scripts like swish.cgi and perl modules in the
>example/modules directory aren't set up for Win32 either.
>
>I know from experience that SOME perl scripts fail oddly
>when the line terminations are wrong for the platform on
>which they're running. Has anyone thought about this?

They run on my machine as is.  Would be nice to get those converted.  I
never notice because all of my editors on Windows are smart enough to open
those files.  It's more interesting chasing down segfaults, I suppose.

>Strangely enough, when I use WinZip to unpack the standard
>source distribution, swish-e-2.2.tar.gz, the resulting files
>are converted to Windoze line termination by WinZip... so
>the stock distribution is actually more correct on a Win32
>platform than the Win32 distribution is.

No, that's winzip doing that, I'd guess.  Of course the source distribution
has unix line endings.

>Can anyone tell me what the difference is? It seems the
>Win32 tree is identical to the source distribution EXCEPT
>for the .exe and .dll files at the top of the install tree.
>Is that accurate? If so, why not distribute the exes by
>themselves and use that file to supplement the stock release?
>(Heck, why have an install step at all, why not just ship
>a self-extracting zip file?)

I think Dave has put in a huge amount of time and frustration working with
Windows just to get things to work correctly.  I think he's done a good job
with the way it is.  

-- 
Bill Moseley
mailto:moseley@hank.org