At 11:59 PM 2/20/02 +0100, Andreas wrote:
>Lex,
>
> > It's kind of interesting how different platforms are affected by this.
> > Old Unix VM's are perfectly fine with these images, because they just
> > obediently pass on the requested image file to the
> > platform-independent portion of Squeak.  The Windows VM's (and maybe
> > the Mac VM's?) try to do some sanity checking to protect the
> > user from Bad Catastrophic Horrible Bad Things that they couldn't
> > possibly want,
>
>Actually no. What you're seeing is a side effect of an entirely
>different feature - namely that of being able to start Squeak just by
>double clicking on the executable or dropping some project file or
>whatever onto it. In order for this to work, the VM checks if the thing
>you're passing in is a Squeak image file and if not, tries to find one
>on its own.
>
> > and end up being a tiny bit too restrictive. Instead of fixing the
>sanity
> > check, it would be possible to just *remove* the check, but I don't
>remember
> > anyone proposing that kind of solution.
>
>For good reasons. Many (most?) Windows people are used to start
>applications and therefore, if there is a Squeak.exe they will try to
>start it and if it dies for no good reason or gives questionable
>responses (like popping up dialog boxes etc) you've just lost a possible
>user.
>
>Cheers,
>   - Andreas

But the same check is implemented in several different places in the code:
checkImageVersionFromstartingAt in interp.c does it (and this is ultimately 
why the image can be read)
SqueakImageLength in sqWin32Window.c does it
IsImage in SqWin32Args.c does it

I just excised IsImage from my source, and replaced the one call to it with 
SqueakImageLength()>0 (this is not in the diffs I put out).  So those two 
seem redundant.  And I wonder if there's a way to get rid of 
SqueakImageLength too.  The failure behavior of checkImage version is 
probably no good, but there's some redundancy here it would be nice to 
eliminate.