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Title: Editorial: Fixed fixation
Author: Martin Moene
Date: 08 July 2016 20:43:31 +01:00 or Fri, 08 July 2016 20:43:31 +01:00
Summary:
Body:
I’ve recently been frustrated on a few occasions trying to install software for Microsoft Windows. I have a PC with an adequately sized SSD as a system disk for improved boot time, and a much larger ordinary hard disk. Most application installers give you the opportunity to choose a location for the installed software, and I routinely install to the larger disk. Some installers don’t. This is frustrating enough, but some installers give you the option to choose your own directory, and then still install huge amounts of files to the system disk anyway. Yes, Microsoft Visual Studio, I’m looking at you.
The accepted fix for this seems to be to use Junction Points, a facility introduced for NTFS in Windows 2000. These behave in much the same way as Un*x’s file system links (which have been around for much longer), and are a great improvement over Windows shortcuts. The trouble is, Junction points aren’t as nicely integrated into the Windows environment; you cannot manage them by default in UI tools like Explorer, and the command line interface is seemingly deliberately different to the Un*x equivalent – ln.
It’s not just a drive-letter issue, although this is clearly so out-dated that tools such as Junction Points and logical drive assignment have arisen to escape the origins of being a way of managing physical devices on – let’s be honest – less than capable file systems. Despite the well-publicized limitations on the length of the PATH environment variable in Windows, the default installation directory for Windows is 13 characters long (19 for 32 bit apps). This, coupled with installers that don’t give you the option to choose an installation location that has a shorter name (bin, for instance, is a common choice), or software that insists on residing in a specific location, leads to frustration and annoyance.
There is a wider issue of sensible defaults, especially for user-interface design, which will have to wait for another time. Until then, thank you for listening.
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