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

[Ignacio Diaz-Emparanza]

With respect to the thread that has been opened this weekend, about the 
directories for open/save data and scripts. I only want to teel you something 
about my experience.

I have been living quietly for years saving and opening data to /myhome/gretl 
(my userdir) without any problem. I must say that the projects I worked on 
were not very "big".  On this year I started to work on two "bigger" new 
projects so I felt the need to organise them in subdirectories.  I used for 
example /myhome/gretl/mybigproject as subdirectory for one of the projects 
and I also lived peacefully until the project grow so much that I needed to 
include the scripts in a subdirectory and the data in another subdirectory.
I could see that  /myhome/gretl/mybigproject/data was not a good place for 
this data files, as gretl sometimes (maybe always?) could not find them.
I also had problems with  /myhome/gretl/mybigproject/scripts and 
 /myhome/gretl/mybigproject/db (for the databases). So I studied very 
carefully the manual and found a not-very-clear explanation of what was 
happening (in section 4.8 Data file collections):

Besides the pre-installed data and scripts that comes with gretl (and specific 
known collections as Davidson-MacKinnon, Gujarati, etc) gretl follows a 
particular path to look for new collections of data and scripts:
-The program searches in the "system" data directory, the system script 
directory, the user directory, and all first-level (and only first-level I 
remark) subdirectories of these.

I didn't found this path the most appropiate for me, because I wanted to 
mantain each of the new projects  as subdirectories of /myhome/gretl, but I 
understood why /myhome/gretl/mybigproject/data was not working and I solved 
my problem changing this subdirectory to /myhome/gretl/mybigproject-data
and the scripts directory to  /myhome/gretl/mybigproject-scripts. Both are 
first-level directories from my userdir (/myhome/gretl) so I have no problem 
now.

I understand that the new concept of a user's "working directory" that Allin 
is proposing, in my case may allow to define as "working 
directory"  /myhome/gretl/mybigproject/ and so the directory structure I 
firstly organised may work.

I think also that I don't find very useful that gretl searches for new data or 
script collections in the "system" data dir. or the "system" script dir. 
since normally only the superuser (root) has writting acces to such places.





-- 
Ignacio Diaz-Emparanza  
DEPARTAMENTO DE ECONOMÍA APLICADA III (ECONOMETRÍA Y ESTADÍSTICA)                                        
UPV/EHU
Avda. Lehendakari Aguirre, 83 | 48015 BILBAO
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