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

[Paul Sture]

On 2016-10-23, Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> 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.

It looks like you just volunteered yourself :-)

> 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.

And have just demonstrated that you know what needs to be done :-)

> 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.)

Not sure what you mean by "abstracts" but you can find a copy of
the relevant FREEWARE_README.TXT here:

<http://openvms.sture.ch/freeware/v70/emacs/freeware_readme.txt>

I've got the freeware_readme.txt files for all the Freeware CDs from
V4.0 to V8.0 online here:

<http://openvms.sture.ch/freeware/>

(in the few cases where individual packages didn't have associated
freeware_readme.txt files, I did my best to create reasonable
descriptions to fill the gaps)

The listings there point at http://www.decuslib.com (kindly hosted by
VAXman) for the packages themselves.

> 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.

This kind of feedback does need to be recorded somewhere...

-- 
My kettle isn't connected to the internet.