Re: [Monotone-devel] Setting up syncs & read/write permissions on Windows

[Ken MacDonald]

On 4/26/07, Nathaniel Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> Windows does have a concept of a home directory!  Sort of.  Very sort
> of.  The current logic, which we stole from Qt, is:
>   check to see if user has HOME envvar set (I think this is mostly for
>     cygwin users and the like)
>   check to see if user has USERPROFILE envvar set (I think most people
>     do)
>   check to see if user has HOMEDRIVE & HOMEPATH envvars set
>   check to see if user has SystemDrive envvar set
>   just use "c:" as home directory
> These are all official ways to do this, and there's actually another
> way that we don't try...
>
> Probably you can see what ~ means to monotone by running
>   echo %USERPROFILE%
> though.
>
> The conf dir is actually much simpler, we just check for the envvar
> APPDATA, which is standard.  You can see it just the same way:
>   echo %APPDATA%
> Though here we _do_ fall back on the magic win32 api call if the
> envvar is not set (SHGetFolderPath(NULL, CSIDL_APPDATA, ...), of
> course!)
>
> This is all just in win32/fs.cc in the source:
>   
> http://viewmtn.angrygoats.net/revision/file/386bd5fab3b55635765c1f0bc3beddbe970afc8d/win32/fs.cc

Hi Nathaniel,
Very Cool. Using this reply as fuel, I was able to find out quite a
bit more about Windows envvars than I knew before. %USERPROFILE% and
%APPDATA% appears to indeed be the main responsible parties in my
case; what I didn't know is that there are quite a batch of  "hidden"
envvars - those two among them - that do NOT show up in the control
panel when you look at the envvars there. I found a pretty nice list
at:

http://kennethhunt.com/archives/000933.html

but Google brought up a bunch of similar ones if that one goes missing
someday. Anyway, this explains a bunch of behavior, not just for mtn,
but other Windows apps.

> Maybe it should just be a relative path, in fact...
>
>   mtn db init --db=beth.mtn
>
> That rather eliminates the issue :-).
>
> -- Nathaniel

That approach works quite well for several things in the doc; there
are still a few that are quite different on Win vs. u*x, besides 'cat'
<--> 'type'. I wasn't able to get the ssh 'password saving' thing from
the tutorial going, as Windows doesn't appear to have an 'ssh-add' or
'ssh-agent' command to utilize the 'id_monotone' file described there.
Also, using the command from the tutorial "mtn ssh_agent_export
~/.ssh/id_monotone" resulted in no file being created. I figured maybe
the '.ssh' directory didn't exist, so tried "mtn ssh_agent_export
~/id_monotone", and it still failed silently. Finally, trying "mtn
ssh_agent_export id_monotone" it created id_monotone in a local
directory, but it seems that it's perhaps a bug that "mtn
ssh_agent_export" doesn't seem to honor translating "~" to some
representation of a home directory as "mtn db init" does. Or maybe
it's a bug that "db init" works - I'd be happy getting a "hey, I don't
understand ~/beth.mtn - you're on Windows, remember?" message :-) but
having inconsistent usage between commands is confusing.
Thanks again for the info,
Ken