[Vm-dev] Putting internal and external generated plugins in a common directory (was: VMMaker-oscog issues on RISC OS)

[David T. Lewis]

On Tue, Apr 09, 2013 at 03:25:52PM -0700, tim Rowledge wrote:
> 
> I'm making a start at building the RISC OS StackVM and running into some fun problems.
> 
> First one was the code in VMMaker class>generateConfiguration that builds directory names by means of evil URI related methods. Strange and ugly results occur for RISC OS and tracing the code reveals many strange and ugly things happening for every platform - it's just that on an OS where something like / is  acceptable as a root directory it sort of ends up ok. RISC OS does not do that and I'm a little surprised that it doesn't cause problems on Windows too. My perfectly nice SDFS:RISCOSPi.$ root gets mangled to something like /SDFS%3ARISCOSPi%2F%2a/ or whatever. A simple fix for that is to change to "(FileDirectory default directoryNamed:'foo/bar') fullName"
> 

On a related (?) note, I would like to ask if the RISC OS build could be
changed to allow all plugins (whether internal or external) to be generated
to a single source directory, i.e. 

  src/plugins/FilePlugin/
  src/plugins/OSProcessPlugin/

Instead of:

  src/vm/intplugins/FilePlugin/
  src/plugins/OSProcessPlugin/

I think that we have had agreement from Eliot and Andreas (who moved to this
structure for the Cog work) as well as Ian (who also strongly encouraged
it and plans to make the change in trunk). But I don't know if the flattened
directory structure might cause problems for RISC OS.

The VMM support is in place if we are ready to make this change:

  VMMaker class>>useSinglePluginsDirectory:

So, question to Tim - would it cause problems for you if we move to a single
directory for internal and external generated plugins?

Dave