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Re: How change $AddOnsDirectory

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg41207] Re: [mg41128] How change $AddOnsDirectory
  • From: John Fultz <jfultz at wolfram.com>
  • Date: Wed, 7 May 2003 03:55:57 -0400 (EDT)
  • Reply-to: jfultz at wolfram.com
  • Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com

Several responses coalesced in this mail...



On Tue, 06 May 2003 10:54:38 -0400, Murray Eisenberg wrote:
>Under Windows XP, on the Environment Variables tab of the Advanced tab
>on the System Properties control panel, I set
>
>MATHEMATICA_PREFERENCES
>
>to have value d:\Math\AddOns, in both the "User variables for
>Administrator" (the account I'm using) and "System variables".  This
>seemed to have no effect whatsoever!  When I start Mathematica (two
>different versions), the values are exactly the same as the defaults:
>
>$AddOnsDirectory
>C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Mathematica
>
>$UserAddOnsDirectory
>"C:\\Documents and Settings\\Administrator\\Application 
Data\\Mathematica"

The documentation is wrong or, more specifically, outdated on this point. 
 MATHEMATICA_PREFERENCES was used in 4.1 and earlier versions of 
Mathematica, and the documentation wasn't updated on this point.  Thus my 
email.


>Actually, the location of "My documents" directory under Windows is
>rather trivial to change via TweakUI from the Microsoft PowerToys (or
>directly by editing the registry).
>
>So on any of the 6 Windows systems I administer, the very first thing I
>do is to change My Documents to point to a suitable directory on my data
>partition.

And Mathematica will follow that preference.  Since we're using system 
calls to follow these directories, we avoid any of the dangers of 
hard-coding.  My original point was about the philosophy behind 
Microsoft's default choices.

I respect your "multiple drive" philosophy, but most people will never use 
it (a great many machines only have one drive...my own, in fact, does), 
and it's completely inappropriate for certain networked environments (i.e. 
the "roaming" profile scenario I mentioned earlier).  Mathematica's 
defaults must be made to work in the greatest number of environments as 
well as possible.  So, we choose to follow Microsoft's recommendations; 
the environment variable overrides are there for everyone else.


>Further, they do not behave quite the way you say.  As a system variable
>I set
:
:
>-- without any "\Mathematica" appended thereto!


Yes, you are right.  My oversight...I was describing from a slightly 
faulty recollection of my work and not the actual source code I wrote to 
do this.  Sorry for the confusion on that point.

The code does, in fact, add the product name, but not in the case of an 
environment variable override...only in the case of a default selection.

Sincerely,

John Fultz
jfultz at wolfram.com
User Interface Group
Wolfram Research, Inc.




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