How to call System.getProperty("user.home") from ABCL

[Mirko Vukovic]

On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 1:52 AM Mark Evenson <evenson at panix.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 6/20/17 21:35, Marco Antoniotti wrote:
> > Well.  It looks like somebody’s bug nevertheless.
> >
> > These are not the days of MS-DOS anymore, and I believe that W10 has a
> clear notion of “user home”.
>
> It is a bug with the ORCL JVM, which does not properly encapsulate the
> notion of "user home" under Windows, probably because it has been
> historically revised and overloaded as (un)necessary by MSFT.
>
> ABCL needs to support any Windows platform capable of running Java 6,
> not just Windows 10, so we would need code conditionalized by the
> Windows platform that ABCL is running on.  As such, we would need a
> clear notion of "user home" on all existing Windows operating systems.
> Were someone submit such a patch, we would include it with ABCL.
>
> The user may always specify the value of "user home" to ABCL by passing
> a '-Duser.home=SOMEPLACE' argument to the invoking JVM.
>

In the meantime, Section 2.2 of the documentation can be updated to reflect
this suggestion.  Since I don't have the sources, and don't want to submit
a patch, I hope the following text (derived from Mark's email) can be
easily included at the end of section 2.2 (feel free to edit).

On Microsoft Windows, the notion of the user home directory is not
consistent across OS releases, upgrades, and system settings. The user can
specify the home directory by passing "-Duser.home=someplace" to the
invoking JVM. As an example, abcl.bat file should be modified to this
effect:

"C:\Windows\sysWOW64\java.exe" "-Duser.home=C:\Users\..." ...


 Mirko
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