[izpack-devel] odd / unexpected behavior -> comments please

[Elmar Grom]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to let you all know about a strange experience I just had during an
installation and a related experience some time ago. Perhaps it can help
others to deal with similar issues. BTW The experience some time ago was
what prompted me to suggest the logging facility, so that users get better
information if an installation was not entirely successful.

What happened some time ago was, that the properties of a file with the
extension .cfg seemed to have been changed to read-only, during or
immediately after installation! As you might guess, later attempts to
override said file where not successful, which caused problems.

What happened today on a customer's machine, was again related to a file
with the same extension. This file is a plain text file. After installation
the result on the customer's machine was not as expected a new version of
this file, but a *merge* of the prior existing content and the new content!

I should mention, that if you look at the comment for files with this
extension in the Windows Explorer, it says that it is a configuration file
for Microsoft Outlook.

I had a brief phone discussion about this incident with Klaus and we both
agree that either Windows or some kind of daemon installed by Outlook
perform some 'magic' in the background if a change or new installation to a
file with this extension is detected.


Suggestion / Request for Comments
=================================

I suspect this is hardly the only strange thing that happened during an
installation, nor do I believe such things are isolated to Windows.
Therefore I was thinking, that a knowledge base about observed install
related problems might be a helpful thing. It might even help to avoid some
problems, e.g. if I had known that the extension .cfg could cause this kind
of trouble, I would never have used it.

- what do you think about this suggestion?
- how could we best establish such a knowledge base for IzPack?

Cheers

       Elmar