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Date:Mon Feb 11 23:47:01 2003 
Subject:Re: bham's $poplocal/local directory (ved_aspell) 
From:A . Sloman 
Volume-ID:1030211.04 

Steve Isard made some suggestions that may resonate with other people,
in response to my earlier posting:

[AS]
> > I want to phase out these
> >     http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/new/linux1553.tar.gz
> >     http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/new/linuxmotif1553.tar.gz
> > which include pre-built binaries and saved images that will not work
> > on all versions of linux
> >
> > and just use this:
> >     http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/new/linux-poplog.tar.gz
> >             12946926 bytes (can change)


[SI]
> I think it's probably the right thing to let people make their own
> binaries, in the same way that lots of packages tell you to./configure,
> make, make install.  Does this package include some sort of minimal
> poplog for building the real one, or do you just have to link with your
> own library setup?  Is the idea that it's only X/motif type things that
> won't work everywhere?

It has a minimal executable poplog.

For novices there are two scripts:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/com/INSTALL_MOTIF_POPLOG
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/com/INSTALL_NOMOTIF

If you have motif run the first: it relinks poplog for use with
motif, using
    $popsys/poplink_cmnd

and then builds saved images.

The other relinks poplog for use without motif and builds saved images.

Both by default then run INSTALL_LIKE_BHAM if present, which installs
core bham staff in $poplocal/local and builds the bham saved images.

I want to unify this so that the essential bham stuff goes into the
standard saved images, including objectclass, rc_graphic, modified
readline, prwarning and various other things.

Experts can comment out unwanted bits of the installation scripts before
running them. Maybe I'll provide an INSTALL_MINIMAL script for that.

[SI]
> However, I urge you to retain some sort of version number or date as
> part of the package name or people are going to get very confused as
> files get changed and added.

When I next repackage things as proposed I'll call it poplog V16 and the
core tar file will have a new name. I'll leave the old one for a while.

The same problem arises for all the extras, newkit.tar.gz, rclib.tar.gz,
popvision.tar.gz, rcmenu.tar.gz, simworld.tar.gz, etc. etc.

Unfortunately right now there are lots of places where these and other
packages are referred to explicitly by name, and adding version
information to all the file names will mean a lot of editing, e.g. in
here:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html

A way round this is to put each package in its own directory which has a
permanent name, and then the link from the main hmtl file will show you
the contents of the directory, as happens here

    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/teach/

Since browsers typically show date information when listing a directory
that will, I hope solve the problem. unfortunately I did not start with
that idea.

Another issue is that I have rather simple shell scripts for making all
the tar files and currently I have not made them add any version
information to the file names.

One problem if I did add version information is that scripts that build
larger packages from smaller ones would have to become more complex.
E.g. the popextras.tar and bham-linux-poplog.tar.gz files include
several smallar tar.gz files.

As a partial solution I followed a suggestion that Brian Logan (I think)
made.

A lot of the scripts that build a tar.gz file also include in it two
files whose names start AA which record the date at which the tar file
was last built and the most recently changed contents of the package.
E.g. rclib.tar.gz includes these two:

    rclib/AATARBUILDSat Feb  1 12:01:22 GMT 2003
    rclib/AATARFILE.LATEST

(the first file name has spaces in it.).

So by looking at your version and comparing it with the date on the web
site you can see whether your version is out of date.

Graham Higgins started doing something a lot more systematic at
the www.poplog.org site, but the mirroring scheme has somehow broken
down and most of his versions of our files are now out of date.

I think Steve Leach is trying to fix that.

Basically they have much more expertise at this sort of thing than I
have -- and they use more powerful tools. We should work more together.

[SI]
> Ideally a linux style CHANGELOG would be
> included in the package, but that might require more admin time than you
> can spare.

For all the packages that I manage I try to include in the help/
subdirectory a news file, and Steve Leach has now also started doing
this for objectclass. See
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/rclib/help/rclib_news
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/newkit/sim/help/sim_agent_news
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/newkit/prb/help/prb_news
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/src/master/C.all/lib/objectclass/help/objectclass_news

The main poplog news file HELP NEWS appears not to have been updated
since May 1997 however. Bringing it up to date will be tricky.

A relevant resource is this file, which should perhaps go into the
poplog package:
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/bugfixes/BUGREPORTS

Which reminds me, Waldek Hebisch, who played an important role in fixing
the pc poplog array bounds bug has done some more analysis of call vs
jmp in the pc poplog assembler files, which I have not yet studied.

There may be more problems to fix.

I also have not transferred the array bounds fix to windows poplog, as I
don't know how.

Aaron