[Geany-Devel] Setting Windows working directory

Sat May 18 14:12:04 UTC 2013

Hey,

sorry for the delay.

On 19/03/13 17:55, Colomban Wendling wrote:
> Le 19/03/2013 14:02, Enrico Tröger a écrit :
>> On 16/03/13 18:23, Colomban Wendling wrote:
>>> Le 15/03/2013 16:18, Nick Treleaven a écrit :
>>>> On 13/03/2013 06:19, Lex Trotman wrote:
>>>>> Shouldn't plugins use geany->app->configdir as the base directory as
>>>>> perhttp://www.geany.org/manual/reference/structGeanyApp.html
>>>>>
>>>>> and if its Geany it can use GeanyApp.datadir as the system data
>>>>> directory.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>   For this to work, the working
>>>>>>> directory must be set correctly. The reason for the mentioned change
>>>>>> was
>>>>>>> this in some plugin, so I've moved the code to change the working
>>>>>>> directory to perform it earlier in the init process, before loading
>>>>>> plugins.
>>>>>>> For a quick'n'dirty fix we could either move the working directory
>>>>>>> change code move after command line parsing code but before plugin
>>>>>>> loading or we remember the working directory at early stage to use this
>>>>>>> when llater handling command line arguments.
>>>>>>> Both are not nice and the real solution is to get rid of relative paths
>>>>>>> for resources in the installation directory.
>>>>>>> I'm going to work on this.
>>>>> Yes it would be better to keep the working dir, ... well ... the
>>>>> working dir:)
>>
>> Ok. Just to get it clear, do we want to not change the current working
>> directory at all? Before my change we *did* change it very late in the
>> init process. If we decide to not change it at all, we might lock again
>> the directory where Geany was started as in bug #2626124.
>> As Dimitar noted in this thread, this is not as bad and uncommon as I
>> assumed. So if we all agree on this behaviour, I'd be ok with.
> 
> I don't care very much actually, but the idea of not locking the
> directory from where Geany was started looks sensible.
> 
> Is there real issues on cwd()ing apart the option parsing one?

Excluding the relative path resource loading problem, I don't know of any.

So, we have two options here:
a) remove the code to change the working directory on Windows
completely, which would cause locking the directory from where Geany was
started
b) revert my faulty commit to the previous behaviour we had for years:
changing the working directory at the end of the init process to not
lock the original directory

I personally would vote for b but don't mind much since most votes so
far went for a). Just tell me what way to go and I'll change it.

For now, I committed a workaround for Windows to the 1.23 branch to
remember the original working directory and use it when resolving
relative paths passed on the command line to fix that behaviour.
This should do for the 1.23 series, for master we should find a real
solution.

>>> require an API the plugins could use to get the sysdir -- or make all
>>> plugins use g_win32_get_package_installation_directory_of_module() but
>>> it's tedious.
>>
>> Yes. We already have Geany's datadir in app->datadir which can also
>> accessed by plugins though it's of no use for plugins.
> 
> Yeah but it doesn't point to somewhere sensible for plugins, it points
> to either $prefix/share/geany or $geanywininstalldir/data, whereas
> plugins should look in their own directory.

True.

>> But it'd be easy to export something like win32_get_installation_dir()
>> or maybe even a utility function which contructs the path for a plugin
>> to be more convenient.
> 
> I'm afraid this may be quite hard to achieve because AFAIK plugins are
> installed inside Geany's directory, right?  So it'd probably be really
> hard to determine where the module's data have been installed…
> 
> Moreover g_win32_get_package_installation_directory_of_module() requires
> a Windows HMODULE and I don't know if one can get that from a GModule.

Nope to both points:
g_win32_get_package_installation_directory_of_module(NULL) works
perfectly fine, in Geany and also in plugins. It returns something like
c:\program files\geany\.

This path could be easily used by plugins to construct their own
complete abslute path to any resources.

> But if g_win32_get_package_installation_directory_of_module() is able to
> get the install dir of a plugin, it wouldn't be that hard to fix
> plugins;  though I would think that a convenient API for plugins not to
> have to bother about that would be cool.  However I'm not sure how this
> would work under !win because here we need to know $PKGDATADIR of the
> plugin, which is only known at build time (and is not necessarily called
> $PKGDATADIR on non-autotools build systems)…
> 
> Maybe it would be done with a macro, like
> 
> #ifdef G_OS_WIN32
> # define plugin_get_sysdir(plugin) \
> 	(g_win32_get_package_installation_directory_of_module(plugin->module))
> #else
> # define plugin_get_sysdir(plugin) \
> 	(g_strdup(PKGDATADIR))
> #endif
> 
> or even more convenient but a little harder to implement would be
> something like plugin_build_syspath(plugin, ...) -- the problem here
> being that variadic macros doesn't exist on C89 (hi Lex ;).

Huh? Don't we use them in various places in Geany and Glib uses them as
well?
Except this, I'd want to implement plugin_build_syspath() like
described, just to make plugin authors happy after the plugins broke
which used relative paths so far.

Regards,
Enrico

-- 
Get my GPG key from http://www.uvena.de/pub.asc

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