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

[BillPedersen]

On Saturday, October 22, 2016 at 8:49:54 PM UTC-4, Simon Clubley wrote:
> 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
> Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

Simon:

Thank you for your feedback.

Given that the active effort on GNV is from three or four people on a part time basis the progress made over the last few years to get it to the point where it will build many projects with only the "defined" changes is really remarkable.  When I say defined changes, these are things like providing the workaround code to handle poll and select for all device type and some terminal handling to make it more Linux-like.  With just these changes I have ported a TN3270 emulator for instance.

Yes there are things that need improving.

We need more people involve.

We would welcome more involvement.  More feed back.  More help doing documentation and testing.

Heck, I found an bug in the CRTL that had been there for YEARS earlier this year.  Because no one is doing work in those areas to exercise the code this continues.

I encourage you and the rest of the OpenVMS Community to consider how you can help to contribute to projects such as this to help OpenVMS move forward. There is an immense amount of possibilities of applications out there that can be ported to improve the OpenVMS Ecosystem and I am not suggesting systems utilities.  There are databases, business applications, middle-ware tools, scientific applications.

OK, so you do not like the Linux "-switch" option methods.  Well, I was introduced to a solution to that at Boot Camp this year.  Tom Wade from Ireland introduced me to some code he device to convert Linux applications to accepting DCL style "/options".  You can find out more about it here: http://www.tomwade.eu/software/vmsarg.html.

Anyway, please get involved.

We would be very happy to have more people contributing and testing.

You can get more information at: https://sourceforge.net/projects/vms-ports/

Check out the discussions, the wiki and the ticketing system.

Thanks!

Bill.