Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club! On Tue, 16 Aug 2005 20:40:51 -0600, Scott Warnick wrote: > Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club! > Bastiaan T.Edelman wrote: . . . >> <>We have a problem though... Pocket Arachne writes to the disk, eg the >> configuration files. That is not possible on a CD. > I think we can work around this. Pocket Arachne (henceforth, "pa") > writes to copies of configuration files on the ramdisk. Those > get saved to some nonvolatile place (typically the install CD) when pa > exits. I think the answer is to create a small directory on > the hard drive and use that for storing configuration information. All > DOS/Windows programs that run from a CD without installing > on the hard drive have to do something like that. BTW, this is also true > for a diskette distribution as the post-setup installation files > are too big to fit back onto the install floppy. I propose we warn the > pa user we are going to sully his hard drive with configuration files, > get his OK, and go for it. The case in which you are going to run pa > using a modem and a dailer on someone else's machine and you > don't want to touch the hard drive at all will have to be packaged > differently. Rather than just get the user's OK for your default, I prefer DOS utilities that allow a default configuration to be overridden from the command line. That is, either a few options get specified there OR a file with lots of them gets specified - and one of these options would be, where to write things. Ideally, one single file can double up as a batch file to run the utility and to hold the new options embedded within its comments, to minimise version control problems when someone customises his own scripting. PML. GST+NPT=JOBS I.e., a Goods and Services Tax (or almost any other broad based production tax), with a Negative Payroll Tax, promotes employme t. See http://member.netlink.com.au/~peterl/publicns.html#AFRLET2 and the other items on that page for some reasons why. -- Arachne V1.77+/B~5 Arachne at FreeLists -- Arachne, The Web Browser/Suite for DOS and Linux --