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

[Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti]

On Fri, 21 Dec 2007, Allin Cottrell wrote:

>> 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.

IMO both Allin and Sven make valid points. I agree with Sven that the 
concept of the userdir is not useful if you prefer, as I do, to organise 
your files into nicely separate subtrees. But I've never had a problem 
with "./" in my scripts (I don't know what happens with Windows, though).

As for writing temporary stuff: if the user is not meant to see it ever, 
then under linux (ad I suspect under other Unices too), they belong in 
/tmp/, possibly under a subdir created for the occasion, say 
/tmp/gretl-x6b228/. I _think_ there's something similar in windows-land, 
something like "C:\Win32\Temp", but I don't know how consistent that is 
across the multitude of Windows versions.

How about adding a setting for the default read/write of data & scripts?
Something like

set workdir "/my/very/custom/path/"

which would default to @userdir if unset, or to the directory gretl was 
started from if a special keyword was used (like "here", or "."). Would 
this make things any better?


Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Economia
Università Politecnica delle Marche

r.lucchetti at univpm.it
http://www.econ.univpm.it/lucchetti