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

[Craig A. Berry]

On 10/22/16 7:49 PM, 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.

It seems reasonable to me that release notes for one utility would not
include starting from scratch instructions for the whole environment.

> 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.

The fact that installing the utilities piecemeal may work around
problems with the GNV kit itself (or POSIX root problems or whatever it
is) is not really part of any plan. The kits are in fact intended to be
installed on top of a GNV installation, though if you work your way
through all the details as you have done, you can mostly function
without it. The best available workaround is still just a workaround.

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

ls must be doing something with event handlers as that doesn't happen
with bash itself.

> 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 ?

Type dcl <command>?  E.g.,

bash-4.3$ dcl show time
   22-OCT-2016 22:12:54
bash-4.3$

TPU has other problems:

bash-4.3$ dcl edit foo.tmp
%TPU-E-NONANSICRT, SYS$INPUT must be supported CRT
%TPU-E-NONANSICRT, SYS$INPUT must be supported CRT
bash-4.3$

Probably because SYS$INPUT is a mailbox not a terminal:

bash-4.3$ dcl 'show log sys$input'
    "SYS$INPUT" = "_MBA51195:" (LNM$PROCESS_TABLE)
bash-4.3$

> 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.)

I've never heard emacs mentioned in the same sentence as GNV and as far
as I know it's never been part of it nor intended to be. There is a
micro-emacs that has been mentioned here from time to time, the old
version you mention above, but there have been reports that all VMS code
has been removed from current emacs sources. Trying to revive the VMS
emacs port would be a many-thousand-hour distraction from the goals of GNV.

> 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.

That does sound like a bug:

bash-4.3$ echo WTF
  Cancel


bash: cho: command not found
bash-4.3$

> The /etc/ directory does not exist in the GNV installation

It does in mine.

$ dir/security sys$common:[gnv]etc.dir

Directory SYS$COMMON:[gnv]

ETC.DIR;1            [SYSTEM]                         (RWE,RWE,RE,RE)

Total of 1 file.

This may be one of the things you are missing by only installing the
utilities without installing GNV.

> 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.

More likely an incomplete termcap port but I don't really know.