L.D wrote:
>Today I discovered, the hard way of course, something which needs to
>become a new requirement for any APM available from the Arachne download
>page.
>
>I rec'd an MP3 file attachment. I clicked on it and Arachne went into
>its "what do I do now?" dance. I was certain I'd installed an APM that
>handled MP3, so I clicked on 'search for APM' ...
>
>But instead of searching in the installation directory on my HDD
(snip)
Arachne doesn't need to search if you have it installed. There are
currently (AFAIK) three APMs that can play MP3s (CDP, QV and DOSAMP)
perhaps not all of them makes the correct changes to mime.cfg, qv probably
does and if so dosamp should do it as well since I stole the lines from qv ;-)
, and
>saying "You don't got an APM to do this," Arachne took me right to the
>download page and indicated the only option I had was QV. I didn't have
>QV installed because I'd had bad luck with it before, but since this was
>a new version of Arachne I thought I'd try it.
Most likely a new version of QV as well (it also handles (some?) MPEG video
now). I've never had any problems with QV.
> Before I knew it, things
>were overwritten, changed, "updated" all over the place in Mime.cfg. QV
>then played only a few seconds of what should have been a MUCH longer
>piece of music [108K worth].
Very strange, sounds like a DMA problem but if so you should have
experienced it before. What happens on a normal installation of QV?
>But how was I to 'uninstall' with so much overwritten and changed? I
>looked in the BACKUP directory and nothing was there.
Ah yes, the everlasting problem of backing things up. We've been over this
many times on the list and so far noone has (as far as I can remember
anyway, please correct me if I'm wrong) presented a good sollution to the
problem.
What you as a user can do is the following:
1. Make a backup of *.cfg yourself before installing any APM
2. Learn how to uninstall yourself (finding all mentions of "qv\\qv.exe" in
mime.cfg is done rather fast - most are at the bottom). If you don't know
what lines have been added look in the apm.id file that's in your main
Arachne directory.
>And *THAT* is the change I'd like to see required for every APM
>available on the web site:
>
> Before any changes are made to MIME.CFG or any other file
> in the Arachne complex, the original file should be copied
> to BACKUP directory!
Easy and simple, except that *nothing* needs to be changed in any APM for
that (only apm.exe)
> And, since often more than on APM is installed, each APM
> should put its own extension on the MIME.CFG backup so we
> can tell which was is which. QV should save backup as
> MIME.QV, Telnet should save backup as MIME.TN, Xedit as
> MIME.X etc etc etc
What's wrong with backup\qv\mime.cfg etc. ?
If so a new version could be put together rather fast... Still I would much
rather like to make it possible to uninstall from inside Arachne.
Why not a new idea:
1. Copy the apm.id to the backup directory as apmname.id
2. Create backup\apmname
3. Copy the .cfg that will be changed to backup\apmname
4. Add apmname to some extra file specifying the order the APMs were
installed in
5. Install as usual
So when we want to uninstall we copy the *.cfg from the backup\apmname
directory and then "reinstall" all the APMs that weren't installed (only
the .id files) and rewrite the APM-list.
Now everything that someone has changed by hand has been removed... Is that
a good policy or not? To speak for the idea the people that do change the
.cfg files probably know what they are doing so they can uninstall
themselves and on the other hand we have the unlucky person who accidently
pressed some uninstall button and lost all his changes...
>Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go to my archieves and do a phoney
>install on Arachne so I can get a clean copy of Mime.cfg. And then I'll
>have to try to remember all the change that were made for this an that,
>and I'll have to reinstall the APMs I do want working .... and it will
>probably take a couple of hours and I am NOT looking forward to it at
>all.
Learning how to remove the correct lines from mime.cfg will probably be
very much faster.
//Bernie
http://bernie.arachne.cz/ DOS programs, Star Wars ...
