kudos on the effort, you should have posted about these issues before
Actually, I think I did.
I think passing $SYSDIR is a good idea (options are good). The problem is that its is the search path in mint itself that is the main issue.
No, that is not a problem. SYSDIR is determined very early in init, so when it's set there, there should be no issues with the search path.
What good is parsing the SYSDIR is you cant remember which mint.prg and which mint folder goes together.
You miss the point :) mint.prg is placed IN it's corresponding mint-folder. That's the idea. This makes it much easier when installing new versions, as you don't need to copy anything to the auto-folder and mess with sorting order.
as much as i hate the idea of what it implies (coding and cvs wise) I believe that to pre-pend a build specific path at compile time is the easiest solution, at least that way the only thing you have to remember is SYSDIR, not what it should be, and you can then have any number of mint programs started from an auto/boot loader, with related folders in C:\mint
Does not sound like a good idea to me.1. You need to fill your auto-folder with mint.prg's. All of them with unique names. 2. You can't rename SYSDIR yourself. E.g. I like to keep a "1-18-cur.OK" to fall back to when testing new versions. 3. A user updates his mint.prg and xaaes.km. "WTF, "SYSDIR not found"???"... This makes simple kernel-updates more work than today.
Passing SYSDIR on MiNT's commandline is IMO the easiest solution. If you use "my" loader, you can keep mint.prg in SYSDIR and call SYSDIR whatever you want. If you like the current approach, just forget about the loader and put mint.prg in the auto-folder.
Jo Even