[Bf-committers] Installation/file paths

[Rob M]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: bf-committers-bounces at blender.org [mailto:bf-committers-
> bounces at blender.org] On Behalf Of Matt Ebb
> Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2010 9:17 AM
> To: Bf-committers at blender.org
> Subject: [Bf-committers] Installation/file paths
> 
> Hi,
> 
> My main task this week is to get the issue of installation and file
> paths under control, hopefully before the beta release, and definitely
> before the stable release.
> 
> Several differing proposals have been made for this in the past, with
> no clear consensus and agreement, and there are several messy competing
> systems in Blender's source right now which need to be cleaned. I've
> read over the various proposals, and tried to amalgamate something that
> unifies the ideas and meets all the requirements in each.
> 
> The focus here is on a short-term, achievable target of clearing up
> installation and finding resource file paths. Other things such as UNC
> paths, unicode/international file access, wrapping FILE pointers etc
> can be considered separate issues, and looked at after a stable release
> - this is specifically regarding retrieving system/user data paths.
> 
> Anyway, my proposal is here:
> 
> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:2.5/Source/Installation/Proposal
>

I agree with most of this but why can't the default location for the system
data files be in the datafiles sub directory of the directory where the
blender executable resides? 

This is almost the same (but not quite) as your proposal for Windows and Mac
OS and it makes it a lot easier to run self contained versions and you don't
require a version number in this case as you shouldn't have different
versions on blender in the same directory on windows and the blender.app
folder on the Mac makes it a single version. 
Things are a lot different on unix where the norm seems to be for an
application to scatter itself among a number of directories rather than the
Mac where the ideal is a single .app folder and preferences located
separately or windows where it moving towards a single folder for the
application and specific separate locations for read / write data.