[tex-live] private "tl-bin" directory?

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Sat, Feb 17, 2007 at 10:08:36PM -0400, George N. White III wrote:
> On 2/17/07, Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de> wrote:
> 
> >>>>>> "George" == George N White <gnwiii at gmail.com> writes:
> >
> >  > Windows problems are very much worse, [...]
> >
> >They obviously are, but I don't know whether we (people involved in TL
> >development) do everything properly.  Recently I asked about a good
> >place for $HOME and the result was that people told me that the
> >environments had been quite different on different versions of
> >Windows.

What about dropping support for anything before w2k? If it were just
for w2k and wxp, I would go for %USERPROFILE%. Does anybody know how
things are in Vista?

> Not just versions -- large organizations have quite different setups.
> Some want HOME to be a network drive, and hope that any user can
> walk up to any PC, log in, and run with their files, but in practice many
> applications store things on the C: drive so you end up with messy
> login scripts to load the user's settings into the registry.

Right.  Plus, the local path is always prepended to the user path.
And it is hardly possible NOT to give someone administrator
privileges, if you want them to do any work at all. So everybody is
empowered to screw things up for others in a typical (or at least in
our) roaming profiles setup.

> 
> >What we actually do to adapt TeXLive for Windows is to
> >reverse-engineer things.  Is it really true that Windows is
> >completely undocumented?
> 
> Not undocumented, just undisciplined because it has a legacy of
> monolithic apps that take over the machine.
> 
> >Does anybody know about documentation in the internet?

Maybe you can get better documentation from a copy of Visual Studio
or from an MSDN membership; I wouldn't know.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg