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Date:Mon Mar 26 11:39:54 2000 
Subject:/etc/skel and template Poplib (Was Re: Running Pop-11) 
From:Aaron Sloman SEE TEXT FOR REPLY ADDRESS 
Volume-ID:1000326.01 

I am slowly catching up with comp.lang.pop, having previously been
too busy with work on the How to Design a Functioning Mind Symposium
coming up in a few weeks:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/aisb/
(Advert for poplog users interested in cognitive science!)

Andrew Sayers ug55aes@cs.bham.ac.uk wrote

> Date: 21 Mar 2000 22:13:28 GMT

> I've been putting the default user Poplib directory in /etc/skel, because
> Red Hat Linux copies the contents of that directory into the home
> directory of each new user.  Since RH is the only distribution I use, I'm
> not sure how common that is - does anyone know what the equivalent is
> under other distributions?
>
> Also, this is obviously a Linux rather than Poplog standard.  As I said,
> I've been defaulting to the Linux standard, but would it be better to try
> and conform to Poplog?  Or both? (e.g. create a link in /etc/skel to
> /usr/local/poplog/local/Poplib)

I think using a link to the poplog local directory is better, since
then people with different kinds of knowledge and backgrounds will
find it where they expect.

More on this when I've finished checking out my new versions of
    $popsys/init.p
    $popsys/popenv.p

requiring only ONE environment variable to be set, $popsys, and
later on not even that.

> <snip - environment variables>
>
> Thanks - my next question was going to be about the minimal set needed :)

The comments in $popcom/popenv (or, if you prefer $popcom/popenv.sh)

should help you answer that.

Unfortunately the $popcom/popenv* scripts define $poplocal/local
as $usespop/local by default.

Assuming the local directory is a subdirectory of $usepop is surely
a mistake, since local directories should survive deletion of a
version of poplog. So I am inclined to make $usepop/local a symbolic
link to ../local by default in all the distributions.

I've done this at one university where I helped them install poplog
on suns, and it seemed to work fine, with usepop as
/usr/local/poplog/v15.53 and $poplocal/local equivalent to
/usr/local/poplog/local

I also set the poplogin script so that if ~/Poplib did not exist,
and $poplib was not defined, then it defined $poplib as
    $poplocal/local/Poplib

That meant copying Poplib was not needed for the majority of
users (students who would not have been able to edit their init.p
and vedinit.p files sensibly anyway).

It also meant that it was very easy to modify pop11 or ved startup
behaviour for users by editing files in $local/Poplib

I think that in future I should do that for students here.

Anyone who learns enough to want to edit their startup files can
then copy the Poplib directory over and edit. Most students never do
edit them. (Is that good or bad???)

If you follow that policy then maybe there should be nothing in
/etc/skel ???

A compromise would be to put Poplib in /etc/skel with symbolic links
to $poplocal/local/Poplib/*

Neither strategy works if people try to use ved_dk to produce
permanent changes to key-bindings. so that would have to be changed
to copy files over if necessary.

There's a trade-off between the default of giving people something
they will look at and learn from, and making things simple and easy
to administer centrally. A compromise might be simply to copy over a
    ~/.Poplog-help
file to each new user, telling users where default startup files are
and where to look for information on tailoring the environment?

No doubt there are other, possibly better, options...

Aaron