> I probably should be posting this to Poplog developers but I thought
> it was worth getting some discussion started on the areas Poplog
> needs beefing up in. Now Poplog is Open Source we ought to start
> thinking collectively about where it needs to go.
I'm glad you said that :)
I've just started on Pop-11 (as you can tell from my address, I'm an
undergrad), and found that a lot of people found it difficult to install
and start using Poplog. To that end, I've been looking at ways to make it
less painful to install and get started with it on a Linux system.
Eventually, I'd like to get it all fitted into an 'RPM' ('Redhat
Package Manager') file. The RPM program is designed to automate
installation and uninstallation of programs, as the name suggests.
As a first step down that road, I'm trying to cut out the need to define
all of the environment variables pop11 needs by hand, as people
used to Windows are intimidated by the prospect, and would
probably be confused to see swathes of variables if they were
(for example) following one of the many HOW-TO documents and
were (for example) told to look for DISPLAY. Included is a modified
version of Aaron Sloman's 'poplog' script that only requires
$poplocal to be pre-defined.
I'm planning to do a few other things with this, and I'd just like some
feedback on how worthwhile you all expect this would be to newbies (I
expect that old hands will see no gain in swapping to a new way of doing
things).
1) Once I work out how to use sed, I'll write a one-liner that examines
the name the script was called as, and call the equivalent program in
$poplocal/pop/pop/. That way I can, for example, have a symlink
'/usr/bin/ved -> /bin/poplog', which then run '$poplocal/pop/pop/ved'.
That way, we don't need to extend the path variable.
2) I'll define $poplocal in /etc/profile.d/poplog.sh. Under Linux,
/etc/profile.d/*.sh are executed on log-in. If any other operating
systems use similar principles, and want to do something like this, it'd
be a simple move.
3) I'll look into how KDE and GNOME handle menus, and hopefully add some
automatically. I choose those two because most newbies are likely to use
one or other of them. If anyone has any other options, I'd be glad to
hear them, but since I'll have a hard enough job getting hold of a KDE
workstation, you'd need to do it yourself :)
Anyway, any thoughts on those, or any further suggestions would be gladly
appreciated.
- Andrew
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