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

[David Froble]

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.
> 

So, that lush green grass on the other side of the fence is all of a sudden 
looking a bit brown and withered?

:-)