On Fri, Jun 30, 2017 at 9:56 AM, Alistair Grant <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Rajula, thanks for your write-up.
>
> As the person who pushed Rajula to send his email I feel I should
> respond.
>
> While I'm in favour of Rajula's proposed changes, scripting in
> particular will be much easier, I think we need to make the change
> generally known as it will not always be obvious, e.g. at the moment I
> can rely on:
>
> '../init/mystartup.st' asFileReference fileIn
>
> to always work with the current definition since my init directory is
> always next to the image directory. After Rajula's changes I
> will need to do something like:
>
> (FileLocator imageDirectory resolve: '../init/mystartup.st') fileIn
>
That's not true. It depends from where the image is launched. If you're
running from the command line,
$ pharo Pharo.image eval " 'someFile' asFileReference fullName "
will be a file relative to the path of the image, if you open the image
from where it is located (ie, working directory = image directory).
This is yes different when you're
1) deploying the image in one directory, but you're using it from another
one
$ someDir/pharo someOtherDir/Pharo.image eval " 'someFile'
asFileReference fullName "
But then, why working directory should be image directory and not VM
directory? Just historical reasons?
That's a buggy convention. And people who know what a working directory
is will perceive it as even buggier.
2) starting the process from a graphical environment (ie, double click in
an executable app)
In that case, the OS usually sets as working directory the current
user home directory, or the user "desktop" directory.
In any case,
- we should have a good default, I think that following the principle of
least surprise we should use as working directory what the OS means by
working directory.
- Applications in general should be explicit with their file management.
Each OS has different locations to store different things (data, settings,
libraries, executables)... FileLocator helps by reducing the noise between
different OSs, but we should use it!
> Cheers,
> Alistair
>
>
--
Guille Polito
Research Engineer
French National Center for Scientific Research - *http://www.cnrs.fr*
<http://www.cnrs.fr>
*Web:* *http://guillep.github.io* <http://guillep.github.io>
*Phone: *+33 06 52 70 66 13
