MSYS Portable 1.10.11 Development Test 1

Hey guys,

First of all, I hope I'm not stepping on anybody's toes by releasing this. I will post on the 2 other projects which I believe to be most related to this, and hope those guys can comment and perhaps contribute some helpful information along the way.

For those interested, this is a package that I developed for my personal use after discovering sar3th's MinGW release. It is currently integrating well with MinGW on both systems I have access to at the moment.

Some problems I had putting this together (hopefully someone will be able to shed some light on these, or suggest alternative solutions).

• Creating correct (i.e. portable) directory entries in /etc/fstab (specifically for the location of MinGW). My solution to this was to create a custom.nsh script to scan the /Data/settings directory for an fstab file and relocate it to /App/MSYS/etc. If no relevant file was found then a 'default' would be copied containing the default location for MinGW (i.e. /CommonFiles/MinGW). I could not find a way to locate MinGW under non-standard installations (i.e. when MinGW is not installed under the default X:\PortableApps\CommonFiles) using the standard launcher.ini (tried all sorts of different techniques, but in the end it came down to copying a 'default' fstab into place if a custom one wasn't found.
• Deciding where (and indeed what) to include in fstab. My instinctive idea, and the one I went with in the end (to limit writing to the Data directory) was to mount /Data/home and /Data/usr/local as the relevant /home and /usr/local directories within MSYS. As far as I could gather these two alone are sufficient for most purposes (and the MinGW directory is mounted in the case of necessary library installs etc.) What do you guys think?
• Choosing the current /home/user directory. I found that using MSYS as it was in different environments would create a /home directory based on whichever user was currently logged in on the PC (which may or may not be the same ID on different computers) and resulted in creating many different /home folders and losing access to others depending on which user was logged in. I 'remedied' this by setting $HOME="user" in /App/MSYS/etc/profile. While this has it's limitations (only a single /home directory) it did solve the problem of multiple inaccessible /home directories. Any thoughts, or alternative solutions to this?

Sorry for the massive post guys, I'm new to these forums, and don't want to fall into the trap of providing little and/or irrelevant information. As mentioned earlier, as far as I can tell, this package is drive/folder independent (the only requirement being that /CommonFiles/MinGW is located in the parent directory - although this won't break the program, just mean there will be no access to MinGW), and integrates fine with sar3th's MinGW package (I have successfully compiled OpenTTD and it's dependencies :), and could be set to use a different location by creating /Data/settings/fstab).

If I have stepped on anybody's toes by posting this I apologize in advance, and hope that if that is the case, you will understand a naive young portableapper excited about a project that (finally) seems to be working.

Guys, please download and test, and play around and try to break it, and let me know your results.

Cheers