[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] Tuxtype paths

[B. Luchen]

To my knowledge, Windows uses a mish-mash of environment variables (
http://www.scriptlogic.com/support/CustomScripts/environmentVariableReference.html
) and the registry to manage this stuff, so it would come down to
using the WinAPI to read them. I'd like to think there's some kind of
abstraction of the Windows and 'Nix methods hidden somewhere in SDL,
but I'm not aware of any.

As for online banking, I'm sure a fun program like TuxBanker could
supply plenty of "donations"....muahahaha!


....kidding, of course :)

On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 3:11 PM, David Bruce <davidstuartbruce at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Matt,
>
> On Wed, Dec 2, 2009 at 8:22 AM, Matthew McSpadden
> <webmaster at anvilsmithtech.com> wrote:
>>> In Windows, the word list editor in 1.8.0 relies on "wide-open"
>>> security settings (i.e. C:\Program Files being user-writable), which
>>> is common in the real world but not good practice - so we have been
>>> working on fixing those issues as well.
>>
>> Just checking to see if you were planning to try putting the word lists in
>> say C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Tuxtype or
>> something.
>
> Yes, something along those lines, although my knowledge of Windows
> system administration is minimal.  Ideally, we want a location that is
> readable by all users, but only writeable by users with greater
> privileges (e.g. writeable by the teacher but not by the students).  I
> would assume that the "All Users" location might commonly be set up
> this way.
>
> In *nix, the FHS/LSB way would be to put shared modifiable data in
> /var/games/tuxtype and have the word list directory belong to a
> "tux4kids" group.  Then the teacher would have to be a member of the
> tux4kids group to modify the word lists.
>
> If we want to have data that can be modified by any user of tuxtype
> (like a high score list), the traditional way is to have the tuxtype
> binary be setgid for the group that owns the highscore file.  But some
> distros are deprecating setuid/setgid binaries due to security
> concerns - openSUSE has told me that we would instead need to have a
> daemon program that handles all modifications of shared data.  That
> really sounds like overkill to me - the irony is that most elementary
> classroom computers are set up with no security at all.  It's not like
> we are adding online banking features to tuxtype.
>
>> I can see benefits on a windows network of putting the word lists
>> in a specific users folder, but probably the greatest usability will be in
>> the all users folder. Also for forward compatibility Vista and Windows 7
>> have the application data in a different place. I don't know if it is
>> possible to specify two different paths depending on the version of the OS.
>
> I know basically nothing about Windows programming, but I would think
> that their API would provide functions that return the paths to
> commonly used locations.
>
> Best,
>
> David
>
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