#currentWorkingDirectoryPath is not correct on macOS when using drag and drop to open

On 8 Mar 2019, at 8:33, Alistair Grant wrote:

Hi Max,

On Fri, 8 Mar 2019 at 08:21, Max Leske <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi,

OSPlatform>>currentWorkingDirectoryPath (used by Path>>workingDirectory,
used by Metacello to resolve local paths) always answers '/' for me when
I drag the image onto the VM to open. I'm sure that's a "feature" of
macOS but it's very annoying.
In addition, FileLocator imageDirectory answers the correct
workingDirectory because it uses a primitive instead of the FFI call to
getCwd().

Is this a known issue? Should I open a new one?

This is known behaviour. #imageDirectory and #workingDirectory are
distinct concepts. #imageDirectory, obviously, is the location where
the image resides, while #workingDirectory is the current working
directory for the process.

It's unfortunate that MacOS sets cwd to "/" when starting applications
through the GUI. It sounds like you are already aware of this, but
just to be clear: if you start Pharo from a shell you should see
#workingDirectory return the same value as `pwd` in the shell.

I'm not a Mac user, so I don't know what other applications typically
do, but maybe wrap the startup in a script that changes to something
more sensible (in your case above it sounds like changing to the
directory where the image is located). But modifying
#workingDirectory to answer the image directory isn't a good idea as
it breaks lots of other use cases.

Cheers,
Alistair

Thanks Alistair. I suspected as much. In my case the solution will be to compose the path to the repository in the baseline by hand before passing it to Metacello (e.g. repository: 'filetree:', (FileLocator imageDirectory) pathString, '...'.

Cheers,
Max