RE: [Squeak-VMdev] RFC: Default VM directory

[Ian P. <ian...@in...>]

Hi again, Andreas -

At the risk of answering my own email (oops -- too late ;) this

> 	squeak -cwd /tmp my.image

might turn out to be more confusing than simply insisting that people do
`the usual Unix thing', viz:

	prompt$ ( cd /working/dir; squeak /path/to/my.image )

because it isn't clear what the behaviour of the proposed `-cwd' flag
should be.  E.g: the image file is opened and read before the interpreter
is started.  Then the image looks in the cwd for the .changes and .sources
files after the interpreter is started.  There are two possibilities:

1) the VM calls chdir() before reading the image, in which case we're
   just adding cruft to achieve something we can do using a standard
   Unix idiom: ( cd somewhere; run-my-program ).

2) the VM calls chdir() after reading the image, in which case we're
   going to end up with the very strange behaviour that the VM looks
   for the .image and .changes in different places (the .image is
   opened in inherited cwd, the .changes in the dir specified by -cwd).

In any case, either of the above would mean that to set the cwd to /tmp
(for example) when running squeak from my home dir I would have to do
this:

	squeak -cwd /tmp $HOME/my.image

and then the .changed would be either in $HOME or /tmp depending on the
choice of (1) or (2) above.

Is this not _more_ confusing than the current situation?

Ian