Re: Do you do ASIS?

[Charles Hixson <charleshixsn@earthlink.net>]

Well, I suppose that it is "old style DOS thinking", but I need to
be able to stick the program on a floppy (zipped), mail it off to
another site, and depend on the receiver installing it correctly.  I
am barely able to depend on them copying the files to the same
directory they were in before (this will usually work, I suspect
that they usually copy everything to C:).  I definitely can't depend
on them doing anything more complex.  If I had the
time-money-equipment I could make use of an installer, and achieve
the effect that I want, but I'd need to run the installer the first
time, and I'm not there.

On machines that I set up, I happily use things that require set-up,
but on machines that I don't have any contact with, and that are
barely supported by the agency's tech department ... experience
indicates I can't depend on it.  Some of the machines have gone out
of service because they got so full of dust that they overheated
(these were 286's, but I've no reason to believe that things have
improved).  It turned out that the computer was being kept by the
open door of a fire-house.  The operator was more competent that
average for my users (he *WAS* a fireman), but it didn't occur to
him (or his supervisors, or his co-workers) that this would cause
any problem.  The first sign was when several diskettes in a row
wouldn't load.

So I feel that "DOS thinking" is appropriate for my situation.

Robert Dewar wrote:

> In article <38C6D176.9A7AB6C7@earthlink.net>,
>   Charles Hixson <charleshixsn@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> > 1)  It should be able to be used in the generation of
> > stand-alon programs that do not require a separate library to
> > have been previously installed in the computer.
>
> This seems to be to be old style (DOS like) thinking, not
> applicable to modern Windows environments, given the importance
> of COM objects.
>
> Any serious program distributed for Windows today is distributed
> in installable form, most likely with install shield, and any
> necessary libraries, DLL's etc can be installed automatically
> as part of the installation process.
>
> Virtually all distributed software for Windows is in this form,
> so it seems quite unnecessary to try to accomodate anything
> else. Note that the "Win 3.1 support would be nice" is also
> evidence that this is thinking that comes from a bygone era :-)
> The reference to Feldman's screen package also shows this
> old style thinking, since this package is obviously quite
> unsuitable for the generation of nice looking GUI's with
> decent fonts etc.
>
> The idea that you would have multiple applications installed
> on a Windows 2000 machine all of which contained embedded
> copies of complex graphics packages statically linked really
> makes no sense.
>
> So in fact it seems that you are asking for something far
> different than what I thought was being discussed, namely
> a very simple package that generates very crude fixed-width
> dos-style interfaces (I really can't bring myself to call
> these GUI's at all). That's certainly a reasonable thing
> that someone might want in some case, but definitely GLADE
> and similar GUI tools are not about satisfying this kind
> of requirement.
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.