Re: Portable Xy4 made easy

[Carl Distefano cld@xxxxxxxx]

Reply to note from J R FOX  Sat, 30 Jun 2012
09:06:37 -0700 (PDT)

Jordan:

> Does this -- or any other portable approach -- lend itself to
> Xy-3, or only to 4 ?

It's a cinch in Xy3. You don't need a PORTABLE.PM. There's no
SETTINGS.DFL to worry about; just make sure there are no hard-coded
path statements in STARTUP.INT. In other words, if STARTUP.INT has
"BC ldsgt c:\xy\my.sgtXC ", change it to "BC ldsgt my.sgtXC ". Then,
to "install" Xy3 on another machine, you can just copy over the
files.

One thing to emphasize is that PORTABLE.PM only addresses the core
issues of hard-coded paths in STARTUP.INT and SETTINGS.DFL. This is
the big hump that many people never get over, and the main obstacle
to hands-off portability in Xy4. But gremlins may lurk elsewhere as
well. For example, there may be hard-coded paths in your KBD file,
or in an XPL program you've written, or (in Xy3), in your .HLP file
if you've customized it, or in any number of other places. These
problems have to be addressed on a case-by-case basis, although
there are stratagems for avoiding them across the board (for
example, by using only relative paths, or soft-coding paths via
XPL). There is also the related problem of how to deploy a single
XyWrite setup concurrently, on multiple machines with different
directory structures. I have to believe that people on this list
have solved this problem in myriad ways, and I'd be interested to
hear what they are. I have some thoughts on that, too.

> I've got a feeling it will be tremendously more difficult to do
> anything like this for NB

Yes, NB is obviously a different kettle. I haven't experimented with
portable Windows apps for some time, so I don't know what's out
there currently. My focus over the last couple of years has been on
backing up key data files to the cloud (Dropbox and Pogoplug,
primarily) and falling back on whatever apps are installed in the
machine at hand. In the worst-case scenario, you can always re-
install an app; but lose your essential data, and you're cooked.

--
Carl Distefano
cld@xxxxxxxx