Blind people using setup.exe?

[Brian Dessent]

Igor Pechtchanski wrote:

> One advantage of using the AllocConsole approach is that when starting
> setup from a console window, the output would appear on that console.  If
> there is a way to check whether AllocConsole actually creates a new
> console or reuses the existing one (by, say, trying
> AttachConsole(ATTACH_PARENT_PROCESS), though that'd only work in WinXP),
> setup could also add a "Pause..." prompt after displaying the help
> message in a new console.

I seem to remember a long thread about this in the past, with the
conclusion being that getting any kind of console output from a binary
compiled as a 'Windowed' program was too difficult.  A 'Windowed'
application does not start attached to a console, even if it was spawned
from one, so if you ran "setup --help" from a regular prompt it would
still result in a new console window popping up.  To me that's no better
than just using MessageBox() to display the same info, or perhaps a
small readonly EditText control so that the user can copy and paste the
output without having to know that ^C copies the messagebox contents.

The AttachConsole() function seems to be the way to get around this but
since it's XP only I don't think that helps the cause much.

> Of course, ideally it would be great to have setup interact with pty's...

This might be simple since the pty is just a pipe connected to stdout,
but I have the impression that the majority of users use the standard
bash CMD prompt without setting CYGWIN=tty or using rxvt.

Brian