Hi, I'm wondering if we can have a bit of dialog about ways we can improve Freenet's uptake.
In particular, facilitating the easy deployment of clients, by formalising some kind of fixed protocol for freenet *client* installers to test for presence (or absence) of freenet, and auto-download Freenet (whose installer will in turn download/install Java). This is not an issue with modern operating systems like Linux and BSD, where there are dependency-resolving infrastructures (and a user-base not scared of reading README/INSTALL files). It does become an issue with entropic legacy OSs like Windows. IMO, the freenet Winstaller strategy of auto-downloading a JVM (with user's permission) is a winner, and one best used 'upstream' in Freenet clients as well. (Is this 'auto-download-java' implemented in the current official winstaller?). Here's how I see freenet *client* winstallers working: If there's no Freenet present, the client installer pops up a dialog, saying 'in order to run this application, you need to have the Freenet software installed on your system. Do you give permission for me to download/install this now?'. If user says no, the client winstaller terminates. But if user says yes, then a fred winstaller gets downloaded/executed (during which the fred winstaller in turn downloads/installs Java). So, here are my questions about putting this into practice: 1) What's the proper way to detect the presence of Freenet on Windows? Is there a fixed, stable registry key location for example? 2) If Freenet is installed, what's the proper way to determine if it is running, and how to access it? Does the FCP port get written to a registry key? Or does the client winstaller need to parse freenet.ini? 3) If the client winstaller has to parse freenet.ini, then how should it locate this file (given that the user may have chosen a non-standard directory)? Does the Freenet installer write the installation directory into a registry key? If so, which key? 4) What other issues should a client-writer be aware of when writing a winstaller so that it can *reliably* auto-detect, auto-download and/or auto-start Freenet? Many thanks in advance for your help. -- Cheers David _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://dodo.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/devl
