Said Molly :
Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding/hard feeling, you started sighting
OK, well thats is, as you say, new to me. I even tried firing up my wife's windows box and tried it. And it seems that Windows does in fact allow spaces in dir names so everyone else in the world must be wrong. Wow !
Oh well, i should have been more explicit i guess (although if you interpret it as such, you've seen the exact positions of those spaces). No spaces allowed at the start or end of a folder name. They get automatically chopped off.
and that directories are separated with a backslash (and not a slash).
That I assumed was a typo but was too polite to comment.
The kindergarten answer.
I am sure that was not meant as an insult, Molly has been far to helpful in the past.
Indeed, it was not meant as an insult (that is why i edited my post shortly after to elaborate en be more precise as i realized too late that that answer alone could be taken as an insult).
Since you are talking about newbie to development as a whole, i thought the official sdk documentation from microsoft on the subject of temp directories would be too technical to understand, hence the 'common people's blog-post with pictures and fancy colors' - approach instead.
As far as "an developer must understand windows temp system" I really must disagree. I sure don't (as I have just demonstrated). I build my code on Linux, cross compile on Linux and then take a windows binary over to my long suffering wife's computer and test there. I have really not used windows since Win97 (and Delphi 2).
With the risk of sounding as an insult again, that is your lack of education. and fwiw temp environment variable is present since dos times and was continued with first releases of windows, albeit still dos based.
My real point was that if we are to attract new users, they may well be, initially, non developers. Maybe, over time and with Lazarus's help, they will become developers if we don't scare them off. While capable of being a very powerful tool, Lazarus is also a great "first time" development system.
Although i understand your reasoning there, development really isn't for the faint-hearted and velvet glove approach. Expect many hours of reading through endless sdk's and (lacking) documentation. If you expect to be spoon-fed then you will never be able to progress as you block yourself from improving your own skills. Compare it with having sex.... or do you wish for people to be spoon-fed there as well ... so that they don't get scared off the first time ?
My 9yo grandson recently had great fun building a simple guessing game on Lazarus.
And i'm glad he was able to and hope he had lot's of fun (as well for those playing the game). I take it that the underlying message there was that a user like TS could have been 8 years old ? (i don't think so).