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Design #989

init file obligatory?

Added by John Abbott over 7 years ago. Updated over 7 years ago.

Status:
In Progress
Priority:
Normal
Assignee:
-
Category:
Cleaning
Target version:
CoCoA-5.?.?
Start date:
29 Nov 2016
Due date:
% Done:

10%

Estimated time:
Spent time:
0.95 h

Description

Currently the CoCoAInterpreter requires that there be a file init.cocoa5 in the same directory as the packages.

If the file not found, the interpreter prints an error message (before the banner) and proceeds.
Is this the right behaviour?

Related issues

Related to CoCoA-5 - Feature #485: Initialization for CoCoA-5: file init.cocoa5Closed2014-03-20

History

#1 Updated by John Abbott over 7 years ago

  • Related to Feature #485: Initialization for CoCoA-5: file init.cocoa5 added

#2 Updated by John Abbott over 7 years ago

I found this while trying to create a "quick start" CoCoA-5 by giving it an empty directory as the place to look for packages.

CoCoAInterpreter produced the following error message:

EmptyDir/init.cocoa5: No such file or directory

At least a "nicer" warning message should be printed. Perhaps something like this:

WARNING: missing or unreadable initialization file init.cocoa5

Not sure if the file name should be just the basename (i.e. without any directories),
the name as it appears currently (e.g. EmptyDir/init.cocoa5 above), or the full path.
Perhaps the current approach is a good compromise between readability for non-specialists
and helpfulness to hapless debuggers.

#3 Updated by John Abbott over 7 years ago

In my tree init.cocoa5 contains 9 lines, but only 2 (or perhaps 3) actually do anything useful.

I suggest keeping just the first 3 lines, and deleting the rest. Objections?

#4 Updated by John Abbott over 7 years ago

The critical section of source code appears to be around line 126 of Main.C.
(call to perror)

#5 Updated by Anna Maria Bigatti over 7 years ago

John Abbott wrote:

In my tree init.cocoa5 contains 9 lines, but only 2 (or perhaps 3) actually do anything useful.

I suggest keeping just the first 3 lines, and deleting the rest. Objections?

done. cvs-ed

#6 Updated by Anna Maria Bigatti over 7 years ago

  • % Done changed from 0 to 10

When I added init.cocoa5 I did not consider the possibility of calling cocoa passing explicitely an empty directory instead of packages.
Now we know it makes sense (very fast start of cocoa for calling builtin functions only).
So it should not give an error.

Should we instead (or as well) have a flag -NO_PACKAGES?

#7 Updated by John Abbott over 7 years ago

  • Status changed from New to In Progress

If it can be done quickly, I see no objection to having a --no-packages option.

I am not entirely happy about the name of the option --packageDir, probably it should be --package-dir?

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