Re: Re: AbiWord.Profile

On Mon, 6 Dec 2004 cspurrier@craigweb.org wrote:

> Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 08:10:53 -0500
> From: cspurrier@craigweb.org
> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@maths.tcd.ie>
> Cc: abiword-user@abisource.com
> Subject: Re: Re: AbiWord.Profile
>
> > > The goal is to run AbiWord off of a USB thumb/pen drive. So far I have
> > > UPXed and deleted files down to 6.85MB and created an installer.
> >
> > 6.85MB seems rather large and kinda crappy.
> >
> > I used UPX to compress Abiword.exe and got it down to less than 1.44 MB

the exe was somewhere about 4 MB before compression, and there was just a
single exe which had been built with Microsoft Visual Studio.

> > (that was Abiword 1.0 and I know quite a few things have changed since
> > then but I wouldn't have expected that big a jump in size)

> Abiword 2.2.1 for Windows with just the required stuff and US-EN
> dictionary is 14.7 MB. The 2 series is much larger then 1.x.

I watched abiword development very closely until about Abiword 1.2
I think there was a switch from buidling with Visual Studio to Mingwin
which had a side effect of producing a slightly different (larger) binary
but I haven't checked it in ages and I cannot be sure if this is really
the case.

> > Which files are you including?
> Abiword.exe, the dlls and the US-EN hash and the XML dictionary file.
>
> > I'm not sure I understand why you have created an installer you should
> > be able to run abiword directly in place on the thumb drive.
>
> While unzipping Abiword directly on the thumb drive does work, I have
> aways found an installer easier to use. When I am done I will offer
> both zipped and installer based downloads.

I'm not sure I follow exactly what you are saying here, but if you run UPX
on a binary it is still a .EXE file and can still be run without needing
to uncompress it.

> > I wouldn't have expected the registry entries from Abiword itself, I
> > thought all the registry messing got done in the isntaller (which is not
> > necessarily a good thing).
>
> I am 99% sure they came from the program I tried running it from the
> thumb drive on a system that does not AbiWord installed and then
> searched with Regedit for Abi and found two(3?) Abiword related entries.

If you can provide the keys it should not be too hard to find them in the
code, in fact you can probably find out yourself.
If I were you I would download the abiword source code (the tar.gz bundle)
and unpack it on your windows machine. Then I would take a small part of
the registry key lik the key value and then use the windows search tool to
"search for files containing text" inside the Abiword source code files.

> > > The registry entries deal with file extensions any tips on stopping them?
> > Is ignoring them not an option?

> For now anyways.
>
> > I suppose you could make a custom build and disable them.

Given that the installer is taking care of file associations and it
doesn't seem like the built in file association stuff is ever going to be
fixed (bug 376) it will probably make sense to disable it anyway.

> That is the next plan if I can not find an easier way. Is there a good
> tutorial or guide on compiling AbiWord on Windows. I have compiled Linux
> programs but never yet for Windows.

I think there probably is but I always avoided building Abiword on windows
because it was so much easier to play with on Linux.

> Thanks for all of the help.

No problem, always glad to encourage someone to work on improving abiword
in some way.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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Received on Mon Dec 6 19:04:15 2004