3:41 a.m.
Hi Allin,
Thanks for all the great work that you’ve been doing.
There seems to be a bug when there are multiple instance of gretl working at the same
time.
The versos of gretl I’m working on is 2020c-git built date 2020-05-29.
Here is a description of the problem that I’m facing:
Whenever I have more than one instance of gretl open, and if I closed one of them, then
I’m not able to save the .gretl season file that I have created before.
The pattern of the error message is like: “.myfile/session.xml: No such file or
directory”.
Other times, I get "Unspecified error” when trying to save a session file.
After a few cased like this, by trial and error, I found that if I start another instance
of gretl, and then open the very same .gretl dataset that I was not able to save before, I
can now switch back to the old gretl instance and save the session file that I was working
on.
To make your job a bit easier, I created the following test steps that you should be able
to replicate (at least I can on my Mac):
Quit all instance of gretl
Open gretl
Open the built-in sample file in gretl “banks91”, for example,
Open icon view
Open Notes
Type in any text
Save Notes
Save session file as “banks91_test” for example.
Open anther instance of gretl
Open another built-in sample file “credscore”, for example,
Open icon view
Open Notes
Type in any text
Save Notes
Save session file
Quit gretl
Get back to the session with “banks91”
Open the Notes in icon view,
Here, if I delete the text in the Notes, I get an error that says: "Buffer is
empty”.
If I make changes to the text, I’m able to save the Notes.
But now I’m not able to save the session file.
The error message reads:
".banks91_test/session.xml: No such file or directory”
My solution is:
Open another instance of gretl,
Open the session file “banks91_test” that I saved earlier
Do nothing here.
Switch back to the first session on the same file what I wasn’t able to save before
This time I’m able to save the session file.
I have other minor issues, too, but that is all for now.
Best,
Fred
6:29 p.m.
On Sun, 7 Jun 2020, Fred Engst wrote:
Hi Allin,
Thanks for all the great work that you’ve been doing.
There seems to be a bug when there are multiple instance of gretl
working at the same time.
Here is a description of the problem that I’m facing:
Whenever I have more than one instance of gretl open, and if I
closed one of them, then I’m not able to save the .gretl season
file that I have created before. The pattern of the error message
is like: “.myfile/session.xml: No such file or directory”.
Ah, I know why that is. On exit, gretl cleans up the contents of the
user's "dot-directory", where session-files in progress are stored.
So when gretl-2 exits it's going to trash gretl-1's session
directory.
The workaround is, if you're running more than one gretl instance,
don't close a given instance if you've got an active session in
another instance.
We can try revising gretl's clean-up behavior at exit, though that
won't be particularly easy to get right in the multi-instance case.
Allin
11:36 p.m.
On Sun, 7 Jun 2020, Allin Cottrell wrote:
On Sun, 7 Jun 2020, Fred Engst wrote:
> Hi Allin,
> Thanks for all the great work that you’ve been doing.
>
> There seems to be a bug when there are multiple instance of gretl working
> at the same time.
>
> Here is a description of the problem that I’m facing:
>
> Whenever I have more than one instance of gretl open, and if I closed one
> of them, then I’m not able to save the .gretl season file that I have
> created before. The pattern of the error message is like:
> “.myfile/session.xml: No such file or directory”.
Ah, I know why that is. On exit, gretl cleans up the contents of the user's
"dot-directory", where session-files in progress are stored.
So when gretl-2 exits it's going to trash gretl-1's session directory.
The workaround is, if you're running more than one gretl instance, don't
close a given instance if you've got an active session in another instance.
We can try revising gretl's clean-up behavior at exit, though that won't be
particularly easy to get right in the multi-instance case.
On second thoughts, maybe there's a relatively simple resolution of
this problem.
At first I was thinking, when a gretl process exits, how is it to
know which are "my" files in the user's "dotdir", which should be
cleaned up, and which actually belong to other gretl processes, and
so shouldn't be touched?
That's not easy, but a better approach might be "Last one out, turn
out the lights". That is, cleanup of dotdir on exit is performed
only if there are no other gretl processes running at the time.
Hopefully that should not be too hard to implement.
Allin
8:54 a.m.
On Sun, 7 Jun 2020, Allin Cottrell wrote:
On second thoughts, maybe there's a relatively simple resolution
of this
problem.
At first I was thinking, when a gretl process exits, how is it to know which
are "my" files in the user's "dotdir", which should be cleaned
up, and which
actually belong to other gretl processes, and so shouldn't be touched?
I don't know about other OSes, but under Linux we could have per-process
subdirs under @dotdir, we could just use the PID.
-------------------------------------------------------
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti
Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Sociali (DiSES)
Università Politecnica delle Marche
(formerly known as Università di Ancona)
r.lucchetti(a)univpm.it
http://www2.econ.univpm.it/servizi/hpp/lucchetti
-------------------------------------------------------
4:58 p.m.
On Mon, 8 Jun 2020, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote:
On Sun, 7 Jun 2020, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> On second thoughts, maybe there's a relatively simple resolution of this
> problem.
>
> At first I was thinking, when a gretl process exits, how is it to know
> which are "my" files in the user's "dotdir", which should be
cleaned up,
> and which actually belong to other gretl processes, and so shouldn't be
> touched?
I don't know about other OSes, but under Linux we could have per-process
subdirs under @dotdir, we could just use the PID.
That occurred to me too, but it would complicate matters: in effect
we'd need two "dotdirs" -- one per user, for things like
"functions"
and "data" -- and one per gretl process (inside the former).
However, maybe there's a way of making that non-disruptive.
For now I've done the simple thing: made it so that gretl cleans up
dotdir on exit only if it's the sole instance of gretl running.
Allin
1418
days inactive
1419
days old
4 comments
3 participants
participants (3)
-
Allin Cottrell -
Fred Engst -
Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti