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Date:Mon Mar 19 18:26:05 2000 
Subject:Re: Running Pop-11 (Reply by Steve Leach to Andrew Sayers) 
From:Aaron Sloman See text for reply address 
Volume-ID:1000319.04 

Steve Leach posted the following reply to Andrew. However our mail->news
gateway caused it not to get posted to comp.lang.pop, so I am
re-posting.

Apologies to those who have already seen it.

Aaron
=======================================================================

Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2000 14:11:58 +0000
To: Andrew E Sayers <ug55aes@cs.bham.ac.uk>
From: "Stephen F. K. Leach" <steve@watchfield.com>
Subject: Re: Running Pop-11

Hi Andrew (& other popforum readers),

>a) The latest problem I've found is that if a user existed before Pop-11
>was put on their system, then the $HOME/.Poplib directory won't exist for
>them.  The standard solution to this is to copy the directory across at
>load time if it doesn't exist.
>
>Is there an easy way to do this in Pop-11 (I don't know of one, and I'd
>rather not do it in the shell scripts if possible), and can anyone think
>of a reason not to do it?

The main problem is there is no way to create a directory in Pop11.
You either need to get a shell to do it or to externally load mkdir and
write a suitable wrapper.  This omission is a bad one.

[To be honest, the blame lies fairly and squarely with UNIX.  The UNIX
world has never had a properly thought-out policy for making applications
visible on a per user basis (the $PATH is a joke), giving apps working areas
on a per user basis, installing and removing apps is still painful, and
even basic issues like finding out the installation directories has no
overall solution.  Worst of all, these are all easy problems to solve.]

>b) The large number of environment variables needed by Pop-11 is an old
>problem, but is it possible to do something like this:
>
>vars temppopenvlist = [ pop-specific environment variables ];
>file temppopenvlist in $poplib/popenvlist.p;
>
>then towards the top of init.p:
>
>load $poplib/popenvlist.p;
>[ ^^popenvlist ^^temppopenvlist ] -> popenvlist;
>
>This would at least reduce the number of sitting variables to a handful.

I think this is a rather clever suggestion.

Steve
======================END of STEVE's REPLY======================
-- 
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk   (NB: Anti Spam address)
TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html