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

[Allin Cottrell]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2007, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:

> 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).

I think that CWD and "./" work just fine if you're launching gretl 
from, e.g., the bash prompt in an xterm (as I do).  You know what 
the initial CWD is, and can pre-set it easily by cd'ing to your 
project directory.  On the other hand, I accept that it's of 
questionable usefulness on Windows, where most users won't know 
what the CWD is when they launch gretl (and won't even have any 
means of finding out, short of typing "set" in the gretl console).

> 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"...

I'd really rather not get into that if possible.  But here's an 
idea (based on what you've suggested):

1. Let's think of what we presently call "userdir" as gretl's 
"private" data directory.  On Windows, we needn't offer a choice 
of this directory on installation; we can just automatically use 
USERAPPDATADIR/gretl (the current default).  On other platforms we 
can continue to default to ~/gretl (perhaps ~/.gretl would be more 
appropriate but that has compatibility issues).

2. We add the concept of a user's "working directory" based on the 
present value of "currdir".  We can save this between sessions 
(which we currently don't).  We won't write any "internal" files 
to this directory, but we'll make it the default for explicit 
file open/save, for shell commands, and so on.

3. That leaves the question of what the "working directory" should 
default to on first-time installation, i.e. before "currdir" has 
been set.  Here are some options:

On Windows: the Desktop, MYDOCUMENTS, MYDOCUMENTS/gretl, ??
On Linux: the CWD, HOME, HOME/gretl, ??

We could prompt for this on a first-time Windows install, but I 
think that's likely to be confusing since the user probably won't 
really know what's being asked at that point.

4. One more loose end: should the working dir be explicitly 
settable, or should it always just be set implicitly by data or 
script file open operations?  Maybe we should offer something like

[] Always start in directory: _____________

That is, a check box plus a directory slot that is enabled if the 
box is checked.  (Rationale: a user might sometimes want to open a 
data file or script from some neutral location such as the 
Desktop, without thereby switching the working directory to that 
location.)

Allin.