[Gretl-users] gretl 1.6.4

[Allin Cottrell]

On Mon, 14 May 2007, Sven Schreiber wrote:

> The old problems are gone, but there seems to be a new one: 
> Gretl does not persistently accept new preference settings for 
> the user directory...

OK, I see what's wrong.  I put in place a fallback setting for the 
user directory, using CSIDL_APPDATA. This is intended for the case 
where

* somebody has installed gretl on a given machine, and then
* somebody else logs onto the machine and runs gretl

The second "somebody" will not have a userdir in the registry.

However, I forgot to make this code conditional on userdir being 
an empty string!   This is now fixed in CVS.

Should I put out 1.6.5?  

And while we're at it:

The directory identified via CSIDL_APPDATA is described on msdn as 
"The file system directory that serves as a common repository for 
application-specific data. A typical path is C:\Documents and 
Settings\username\Application Data."

We also have CSIDL_MYDOCUMENTS: "The virtual folder representing 
the My Documents desktop item."

Also on msdn, under "How to Comply with Data and Settings 
Management Requirements": "The My Documents folder is for 
user-created data, but not for temporary storage or application 
state data. Non-user data must be stored using the proper AppData 
path..."

I've been assuming that CSIDL_APPDATA is the "correct" place to
put the gretl userdir, by default.  But actually this directory 
seems to be doing double duty.  It might be better to split 
"userdir", with temporary files going under CSIDL_APPDATA and 
explicitly user-saved files under CSIDL_MYDOCUMENTS.

As you might imagine, it would probably take some time to get this 
right, so I'm not about to do it right now.  Moreover, it's not 
totally obvious to me exactly how the breakdown between the two 
locations should go.  For example, which one should hold 
X-12-ARIMA and/or Tramo-related files?  

Allin