On Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 10:25:16AM -0800, tim Rowledge wrote:
> 
> The location of the directory can certainly be a pain, but I've already
> ranted about the location of the sources file and this is a similar case.
> But let's not get involved in anything to do with the Windows registry;
> we all know that leads to weakening of the walls between us and the
> Dungeon Dimensions.
>

If we want to put the sources files in a shared location that can be
found by any of the images on a computer, what should that location be?
And how should the image find it at startup time?

Clearly it will vary by platform type, and it is tempting to suggest
adding a primitive or VM parameter to support this. After all, the VM
already tells us the location of the image file and of the VM itself.

However, after looking at the problem I think it will be better to
let the image be responsible for figuring this out without any new
VM support. The VM has no real reason to know about our directory
conventions, so if we want to add logic to support finding sources
files I think it will be better to just write it in Smalltalk. This
is certainly the case for Unix/Linux and I suspect that it will be
so for Windows, OS X, and SqueakJS.

For Unix/Linux, the solution can be very simple, just add /usr/share/squeak/
and /usr/local/share/squeak/ to the list of locations to be searched
for sources files.

I suspect (but I'm not sure) that some similar convention will work
for Windows. I don't know about OS X, but maybe it would just follow
Unix conventions.

In any case, I am going to put a possible implementation in the inbox
to get the discussion started.

Dave