Re: [Gretl-devel] 'include' w/o 'open' -- new behavior
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(a)univpm.it
http://www.econ.univpm.it/lucchetti