[Gretl-devel] 'include' w/o 'open' -- new behavior

[Allin Cottrell]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2007, Sven Schreiber wrote:

> Am 21.12.2007 23:27, Allin Cottrell schrieb:
> > 
> > Could you give an example of what you mean by fragility?
> 
> Well, you said it yourself some time ago when you were hunting a 
> bug that I had reported with respect to saved file locations. 
> Apparently many actions on windows implicitly change the CWD, 
> making it's use in scripts quite unpredictable.

Yes, some time ago.  This shouldn't be the case any longer.  
Gretl changes the actual CWD for various operations, on Linux as 
much as on Windows, but we always change back to the saved 
CWD/shelldir for the file read/write operations that I mentioned.

> In general I must say I'm not really happy with gretl's concept 
> of the user dir. Personally I prefer to arrange my files in 
> terms of projects I'm working on, not in terms of applications 
> that created those files. 

I can see your point.  The thing is, though, that gretl has reason 
to write a fair number of files that the user never sees (graph 
files, in-progress session files, auxiliary files in connection 
with TRAMO/SEATS and X-12-ARIMA, etc.)  We want a reliable, and 
preferably constant, location to write those things.  However, it 
may be worth extending the "currdir" notion as setting the default 
for read/write of data files and script files.

> (Another loosely related issue about the user dir: when 
> installing gretl, you are asked for its location. But on windows 
> gretl must be installed as admin, and presumably that will not 
> be the user account that executes gretl afterwards. 

It's my impression that the great majority of Windows PCs are 
single-user machines, on which the "admin" is also the primary 
user.  I know there are exceptions, and we should probably handle 
those exceptions more gracefully.  But I can't agree with the 
general point.

Allin.