[Gvsig_english] gvSIG 2 portable?

[Mijail]

Sorry for the late answer to this thread - a weird combination of  
circumstances made me miss it.
I'll answer now in case it is of any help.

>
> It's also possible to update a portable version of gvSIG (I think  
> the 3rd meeting USB had gvSIG 1.1.1) to put 1.1.2, SEXTANTE and so  
> on. You just need to select the JRE and the gvSIG USB folders when  
> you run the installer and that's all.
>
> At least for linux and windows versions because the Mac apps  
> esoteric folder structure is so depth that I wasn't able to unzip it  
> on the USB (!!).

Future gvSIG versions will be built in a new way that greatly  
simplifies that folder structure, so this won't be as much of a problem.

Anyway, even for already published versions, the problem in fact is  
not in the folder structure, but in Windows.
To make a long history short, Windows can't cope with such long paths.  
Linux or Mac OS X can. So you can unzip it in those OSs and put it  
whenever you want: USB sticks, CDs...

(The long version of that is: the OS X's gvSIG bundle contains paths  
that are more than 260 chars long. Windows APIs can't normally handle  
paths that long: individual file names can be longer than 255 chars,  
but complete paths cannot be longer than 260, silly as that may sound  
[1]. So unzipping the ZIP in Windows fails. It will work, however, in  
Linux and Mac OS X.

Note that the limit is in Window's APIs, not in the filesystem. There  
seem to be ways around the problem, but I have not found any Windows  
program able to extract the ZIP without choking (in my limited tests,  
anyway). I'd recommend preparing the "OS X gvSIG portable" in a non- 
Windows system, even if the destination is a FAT-formatted USB stick.)

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365247.aspx


-- 
H. Mijail Antón Quiles
Independent consulting, software engineering
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