Misplacement of installed binaries

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sat, 2008-06-14 at 10:26 +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> Hi
> 
> >  If you think unprivileged per-user installs are just a bad idea on
> >  windows then say so and we can switch to doing global installs by
> >  default on windows. Perhaps it's only me who does not have write access
> >  to the Program Files directory on any windows machine.
> 
> I suspect that most people should be doing global installs, and that
> local installs should be a secondary option. Not having write access
> to Program Files is an issue though, which I think Vista may make
> worse, by restricting privilaged operations from more people.

So is that a vote in favour of doing global installs by default on
windows or not? Does anyone know what happens when you try to do a
global install on Vista? I only have access to Win2k3 (as non-admin).

> Ideally, you want to do a local install on Windows if you can't create
> a folder in C:\Program Files, and a global install if you can. Is that
> too crazy for a piece of logic? It's certainly less predictable...

We don't actually have any reliable portable way of checking this as far
as I know.

Thing like this have been suggested before, eg checking at configure
time that we have write permission on the directories we intend to
install into.

One might hope that
getPermissions :: FilePath -> IO Permissions
would do the trick but I hear that this does not tell us what we want.
If anyone knows how we could do this check then please say.

So for the case that we do not have write permission for Program Files
and we do have to do a local install, what directory would you suggest
we use?

Duncan