Obviously it is possible to add support for multiple installs, although it does add complexity to the installer and we don't really have a way at the moment to deal with uninstallation because we don't have a mechanism in place to track what instances of firebird are running on which ports. I recall discussing some of this with Dmitry a while back and we started going in circles and failed to find an exit point.
Another issue with multiple installs is that we would need to update the gui to maintain the installs. The cpl applet is currently only designed to support a single installation. It needs some work to make it compatible with v3 and I want to do that between now and Beta2. And I'd like to at least evaluate the possibility of it supporting multiple installs, even if not in the short term. However, something like that could probably be slipped in during RC stage, or in a maintenance release as long as it didn't impact on server functionality. There is also the fact that we can't easily track Firebird running as an app. And neither the task bar icons nor the dialogue indicates anything about the port or the architecture the fb app is using. So work would be needed there, too. Add to that issues such as environment variables and the fact that firebird previously had trouble locating itself (its rules meant it sometimes either can't find firebird.msg for example, or finds the wrong one.) None of this is impossible to fix but it has never bubbled to the top of the 'must do' list and as you can see, adding support in the installer is only a part of the problem. Thankfully a lot of the work in Fb 3 will make multiple and shared installs easier but I suspect that a proper solution must wait till v4. (Which doesn't mean to say that progress cannot be made in the meantime.) Paul -- Paul Reeves http://www.ibphoenix.com Supporting users of Firebird ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Firebird-Devel mailing list, web interface at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/firebird-devel
