Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1998 11:15:48 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Hans-Bernhard Broeker <broeker AT physik DOT rwth-aachen DOT de>
cc: djgpp workers list <djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com>
Subject: Re: Potential gotcha: Win98 vs. NameNumericTail
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.93.980720162757.11115D-100000@acp3bf>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.980721111526.6992G-100000@is>
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On Mon, 20 Jul 1998, Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:

> In looking around, there seems to be one new potential cause of trouble
> with 98 that wasn't there in '95 -- at least I never heard about it.  The
> thing is that M$ now seems to consider the NameNumericTail registry
> setting as harmful, as several installation programs (including 98's
> 'setup', they say) seem to be depending on the short name to be 'progra~1'
> for the the 'C:\Programs' directory (C:\Programme in my German version). 
> Touching it with 'NameNumericTail=00' automatically seems to change this
> to the (more sensible) 'program', which M$ dislikes.

This is nothing new, at least in principle.  I don't know about
Windows setup (I haven't run it even once since the original
installation), but I can definitely name a few programns which rely on
numeric tails in the short aliases, even in Windows 95.

> Looks like at least the relevant entries in the FAQ will have to be
> updated to reflect this new policy of M$, and maybe decide on a
> more-or-less 'official' policy of DJGPP to put in the FAQ.

I think the FAQ already covers that (section 8.2).  Among other
things, it says this:


  If the `NameNumericTail' set to 0 breaks some programs, you can restore its
  original setting after you've renamed the files as described above.
  `NameNumericTail' only affects the short names of new files being created, it
  has no effect on the files that already exist.

Do you see any reason to change that advice?

Personally, I have turned NameNumericTail off permanently.  In the few
cases where some program complained (usually after a bad crash due to
something like power outage at a critical point), I turned the tails
on, fixed any problems which needed fixing, then turned them off
again.

> To deal with the problem itself, I propose adding to djdev202 two '.inf'
> scripts that allow to add/delete the NameNumericTail without regedit

I'm not sure we should do that.

First, I'm almost positive most DJGPP users don't give a damn about
NameNumericTail.  Look at the amount of messages on c.o.m.d. about
problems with -lstdcxx and streambuf.h which disappear as soon as they
set LFN=y.  This can only happen if they *do* have numeric tails.

Second, this issue is only important to those who want their DJGPP
installations work in both Windows and plain DOS modes (or when LFN is
set to `n').  Now, how many users need that?  If there are a lot of
those, we should have been telling them to turn numeric tails off in
README.1ST.

And last, but not least, I think we shouldn't encourage users to mess
with their registry, with or without regedit.  It's a tricky business
which makes it easy to screw a working system.  You must really know
what you are doing.  I wouldn't like DJGPP to be blamed for messing up
user machines.

It might be useful to have those scripts on a separate zip file inside
v2misc directory, though.