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

[John E. Malmberg]

On 10/22/2016 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.

If you are going to install the base kit it must be installed first 
because the various GNV kits will at the least overwrite the files or do 
other stuff.

The current set of repackaged GNV kits are enough to all the configure 
scripts and makefiles that I have personally encountered.  Which now 
means that I can start using GNV to build many of the updated kits with 
out having to create makefiles for them.  For example the diffutils 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.

The release notes could use a re-write. Neither Eric or I have had the
time to redo them.

Most of the work has been concentrating on improving the internals, the 
build procedures and  Bash was the first re-kit, and while we have 
learned a lot since then, a full update of the release notes has not 
been done.

Everything is in a mercurial repository at GNV, and volunteers are both 
welcome and needed.

Changes submitted now would be timely for the upcoming GNV Bash 4.4.x kit.

> 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 does mention the the startup procedure.  Maybe not where you looked.

> 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 aliases should be created automatically.  This worked when I first 
installed Bash on IA64 and on VAX, and works for all the upgrades so far.

I did find that when installing over GNV kits, that the aliases did not 
always get properly created on some systems.  I just did not have the 
resources/time to find out why the procedure works the second time it is 
run and not the first time.

The various full GNV kits seem to have done different things as they 
have been installed and updated the files, so it is hard to predict what 
may or may not be present.

The last full GNV kit that I installed was GNV 2.1.3 on Alpha.  I have 
not tried installing the GNV 3.1 kits at all, so all GNV components on 
my VAX and IA64 are from these kits.

Unfortunately I have not had time to get all the core kits building on 
VAX.  The big issue is that Bash 4.3+ expects 64 bit ino_t structure and 
DEC C/VAX does not support 64 bit integers.  I just have not taken the 
time to work around all the VAX issues.  So the VAX kits are what I 
could easily build.

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

That is a bug.  There are still some issues with Control-C/Y handling. 
The major focus has been in getting Configure/Make scripts to run.

> 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 ?

The old GNV kits have a DCL utility that you can use as is noted in 
another reply.

The previous port of Bash had a mis-feature called "DCL_FALLBACK".  This 
would attempt to run a DCL command if a GNV command was not found.
It never worked right and broke using real Bash scripts.  When the Bash 
4.2 port was done essentially from starting over, I could not find a way 
to implement the DCL_FALLBACK feature to actually work, so I removed it 
and mentioned that in the release notes.

The current Bash 4.3/4.4 ports have an experimental optional feature 
where they will use a foreign command if they do not find a built in or 
external command.

I have figured out how to run the VMS editors under GNV Bash for most 
common use.  I have not had time to produce a new kit with the DCL 
utility and also an "EDIT" utility that would be able to run a VMS editor.

Editors need to be launched with the system() call, and the launcher 
needs to have something to convert the paths from Unix to VMS for them.

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

Emacs is not part of GNV at this time.  As I do not use Emacs, it will 
probably be awhile before I look at it.

> 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).

No default GNV$BASHRC has been provided.  Providing a default GNV system 
bash init file would be nice in the future.

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

Yes, ls needs some environment variables for color to work.

Note that the VMS set terminal/inquire can not detect that putty 
supports VT-4xx colors and identifies the terminal as just a vt102-80.

Also:

The GNV Bash 4.2 and later implements dynamic plug-ins, so far untested.
This has the potential to greatly speed up some types of screens.

Regards,
-John
wb8tyw at qsl.net_work