[h-e-w] Re: Dired on windows

[Benjamin Riefenstahl]

Hi Francis,


> "Benjamin Riefenstahl" <address@hidden> writes:
> > No need to go that far, the basic API GetLogicalDrives() reports
> > the information and is most likely just used by these high-level
> > services.

"Dr Francis J. Wright" <address@hidden> writes:
> But how do you expose that API to ELisp?

The very same way that you would use the WSH.  I don't see the
difference here, except that involving WSH is lots and lots of
unneeded baggage (not to mention it might not even be installed on old
systems).

I wrote a small test program for checking what I wrote about
GetLogicalDrives() in the last message, mail me privately if you want
the source.

> > It doesn't determine if there is actually a floppy or cd loaded
> > and it doesn't check the actual validity of network connections.
> > If you really want those kind of checks, than you'd have to check
> > all drives individually.
> 
> Experiments on my Win XP box suggest that the FileSystem object
> accessible using WSH provides a list of local drives that exist and
> a way to determine whether they are accessible, i.e. it seems to
> provide what is required.

My point is that even Microsoft's own Windows Explorer has large
usability problems with the timeouts that it gets while it determines
if a drive actually has data (I admit I don't have experience with XP,
just Win9x, NT and W2K).  A FileSystem object will either not check
what Explorer checks or it will have the same problems that the
Explorer has.  In the first case GetLogicalDrives() is enough, in the
second case I for myself would not want to use that functionality in
Emacs.


so long, benny