On Wed, Jun 21, 2017 at 1:52 AM Mark Evenson <evenson@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