I'm not sure why there is a project for this, this is not the sort of thing that can be retrofitted if you are doing it for security reasons. Multiuser support has to be buried deep inside the OS in order to stop it being worked around.
Well if you ever bothered to actually read the project description you'd know that this project isn't about 'real' multiuser support. But just a multiple login/settings thing.
Which in itself is a PITA in OS4.x, as somewhere I read that ENV and ENVARC aren't really filesystems, or something... ...and not to treat them as such.
It will be an interesting one to watch develop, that's for sure!
@orgin I wonder if TrueMultiAssign (not yet tested on OS4.1 but worked great on OS3.x) would help here? It allows one assignment to multiple directories to appear as a single directory. For example: Assign example: RAM: Assign example: Sys: ADD Dir example:
Without TrueMultiAssign you would only see the contents of RAM:, but with it you would also see the contents of Sys: .
TrueMultiAssign should thus allow you to have standard assignments that provide access to both local & global files/settings.
This has been discussed in the OS4 team. Something like this will obviously appear as this is the first step to go multi-user (*if* we go there). Even if we don't go real multi-user, this can be interesting to be able to have different users using the same system. Like one Amigan and his children
@abalaban OS4 does not seem to suppor "multiple assigns" in the way that I described it (any more than OS3.1). Note that TrueMultiAssigns came with OS3.9 (or maybe OS3.5).
Going a bit off topic here but anyway, how did that tool expose the 'new' assigns to the system? The same way as LDF_ASSIGNS when doing LockDosList()/NextDosEntry() ? That is, it was basically a setpatch for IDOS->ExamineDir() etc to behave differently?
@orgin I may have been wrong. I could have sworn TrueMultiAssigns came with OS3.5/9, but a quick check of my old install on WinUAE did not find it on the main partition. Instead I seemed to have been using this version: http://aminet.net/package/util/cli/TRTrueMultis
If you read the ReadMe, it does *not* seem to be a simple patch.
Yeah this seems to indicate that: "This means that a program using the improved routines".
An update to DOS library to handle it internally would be better though, so that old applications would not have to be updated for it. (That is, say "list myassign:" would work regardless if DOS was updated for multi assigns or not). But I guess DOS list entries wouldn't like spanning more than one device...
Which in itself is a PITA in OS4.x, as somewhere I read that ENV and ENVARC aren't really filesystems, or something... ...and not to treat them as such.
ENVARC: is; it's just an assign to (by default) SYS:Prefs/Env-Archive/ as always. But ENV: is a special device created by env-handler. It currently seems to behave just as if it were a normal filesystem device when you write or read it, but it probably wouldn't be wise relying on that to be true forever ...
So use GetEnv and SetEnv etc. instead for accessing settings in ENV: