On Fri, 4 May 2001, Ned Konz wrote:

> Trying the Squeak image that's pointed to by Squeakland.org, and using
> the September plugin/vm from Bert, I can't run anything from
> Squeakland.
>
> What happens is that at startup, it gets stuck in
> FileDirectory>>startUp. It tries to verify existence of the file '' in
> /. Which recurses forever, or at least until it runs out of many
> megabytes of space:
>
> Preferences startInUntrustedDirectory is true.
> So it does DefaultDirectory assureExistance [sic].
> DefaultDirectory is UnixFileDirectory on '/home/ned/.netscape/squeak/image'.
> So it tries to see if the given directory (in this case 'image') is in the
> directoryNames of '/home/ned/.netscape/squeak'. However, directoryNames is
> empty, which causes this to recurse up to the root and never terminate
> (directoryNames always returns an empty Array).
>
> This needs to be fixed. Is it the SecurityPlugin keeping
> directoryNames blank?

No. My Plugin/the Unix VM In General does not yet support the
SecurityManager stuff. It still enables the file sandbox for the image
directory before startup, so anything above that directory is invisible.
Andreas for SqC suggests the VM should not enable the sandbox until
"untrusted" content is downloaded. (See the recent "Plugin Versioning
Woes?" thread). I'll see what I can do (although I strongly dislike
something creating a directory outside the sandbox).

> And the spelling of assureExistance should be fixed, because it looks
> embarrassing.

It's too bad you can't tell the spelling from the pronounciation in
English - which makes it rather hard for non-native speakers like me or
the author of that method. How abut hooking a spell-checker into the
Smalltalk compiler? ;-)

Much more important than fixing the spelling would be to rewrite it in a
way so it does not depend on walking up the directory chain. There has to
be a way to test if the directory exists ...

If that is not acceptable, a VM kludge might be to answer exactly one
directory in the directoryContents primitive when in sandbox mode. This
would also make the FileList more functional in that you can walk up the
default directory. But I'm not eager to hack this ;-)

-- Bert