[Info-vax] Installing and using GNV - some feedback and questions

[Simon Clubley]

I've been doing some VMS work this weekend which has really made me
frustrated with the limits in DCL so I (finally :-)) decided to
install GNV on my hobbyist Alpha system.

Some feedback and questions:

Installation was done on a system running the Alpha V8.4 hobbyist
distribution and no version of GNV has ever been installed on this
system before.

The installation was done without first installing the GNV base kit
because I was concerned about the potential directory corruption
issues in this older GNV kit and because the GNV website says the
updated GNV tools can be run without having to first install the
base kit.

The first thing I noticed is that the bash release notes could be
improved with a more detailed getting started overview at the beginning
of the release notes. It should be explicit in the bash kit release
notes what is required for a first time GNV user; the notes seem to
assume that you are updating an existing installation.

For example, it should be listed that there are GNV startup procedures
in sys$startup: which need to be run and that the bash executable can
be found in gnv$gnu:[bin] after you have run the startup routines.

I also had to manually run the command procedures to create the aliases
for the commands; this was not done automatically as part of the PCSI
installation routine. If you are expected to do this manually, this
should be part of the release notes as well.

Hitting Ctrl-C while running ls takes you back to DCL; you need to issue
the continue command from DCL to resume bash execution.

I saw the warning about not being able to run DCL commands from within
bash and not being able to run DEC editors from within bash. Is there
any way around this ?

Where do we currently stand with emacs for Alpha/VMS (and installing
it into the GNV directory tree and running it under GNV bash ?)

Searching online didn't reveal anything obvious about emacs/GNV bash
integration although I saw the reference to emacs 21.2 on the V7
freeware CD. (It looks like I will have to download the whole
of the V7 CD in order to investigate further however as the V7
abstracts URL is broken.)

Typing a few characters in bash and then hitting Ctrl-C causes the
rest of the line after the first character to be executed as a command.

The /etc/ directory does not exist in the GNV installation and
GNV$BASHRC is not defined to point to another location. This means
none of the normal bash startup code runs (unless GNV bash is supposed
to use another mechanism).

ls colouring does not work, even with ls --color=always. This is
probably due to the missing default bash startup scripts.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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