On Thu, 8 Dec 2011, Berend Hasselman wrote: > On Mac OS X function files/packages and databases will be > installed on demand in subdirectories of a "personal" > directory "~/Library/Application Support/gretl" [...] > On Linux (as tested by me on Ubuntu 10.04 and Xubuntu > 11.04/11.10 all of which running in VirtualBox virtual > machines) the situation is quite different. > > Function files/packages are stored in a user's work dir. > However if one sets the working directory to follow the > shell current directory one may end up with multiple > installations of the same functions. With functions > scattered over several different directories. I find this > rather confusing. > > Databases appear to be only installed in > /usr/local/share/gretl/db. When I tried to install a > database from the database server I got an error message > "Permission denied". Why not in "work dir/db"? > > I would like to suggest to install function files/packages > and databases on Linux for users in a fixed directory so > that the location is independent of the gretl working > directory. Similar to Mac OS X and Windows. > > Something like ~/.config/gretl or even ~/library/gretl or > whatever else is sensible for Linux. I've now taken a look at this. Here's what's supposed to happen on Linux: 1) We first try installing downloaded gretl stuff (whether databases, function packages or collections of datafiles) into the relevant "system" location, ${prefix}/share/gretl/<subdir> where <subdir> is "db", "functions" or "data". 2) If that fails due to lack of wite permission, we write instead to a "suitable location" under the user's home directory. Now, in testing this I found that progression from 1) to 2) was (at least partially) broken -- fallout from a reorganization of gretl's error-recording and -reporting mechanism, I'm afraid. That accounts for the "permission denied" message you saw on downloading a database. That's fixed in CVS. The other issue is, What's the most suitable non-system location for such files? I take your point, that if the user has chosen to have the working directory follow the shell (which I favour myself) -- and does not have write permission for the system share/gretl tree -- downloaded files may end up scattered here and there, which is undesirable. So in CVS I've modified things such that the user's "dotdir" (i.e. ~/.gretl on Linux) is used instead, with the standard subdirectories "db", "functions" and "data". (For backward compatibility, we still search the working directory when assembling lists of databases, etc.)

You mention possibilities such as ~/library/gretl, but I don't think that's really good citizenship. The usual presumption on *nix is that a program is entitled to have a "dot-file" and/or "dot-directory" under its own name in $HOME, but users might reasonably be aggrieved if the program created other trees. (I might already have a ~/library directory that has nothing to do with gretl.)