Re: problem with the "stk" script

From: Stefan Monnier <stefan.monnier_at_epfl.ch>
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 1995 16:41:56 +0200

David Fox <fox_at_FIRST.CS.NYU.EDU> wrote:
> I think that there are more advantages than you mention, particularly
> if you are trying to get busy people to try your software. Since
> there are no hard-coded paths in the executable you can distribute
> binaries.

Sorry, I don't see the advantage. Currently, you *have* to provide
the STK_LIBRARY environment variable.
What I'm asking is that stk has a default STK_LIBRARY hard-coded (but
overridable by an env-var, of course). This way, you don't need a wrapper
in the normal case, but you can still use a wrapper if you move the thing
(or, better than a wrapper, you can just setup your environment accordingly)

I think the installation should use at least three paths, for example:
- the (machine dependent) bin (for stk-bin and snow-bin).
  example: ~/$SYS/bin
- the machine and dependent lib (for *.so and maybe some *.stk)
  example: ~/$SYS/lib/stk/2.2
- the machine independent lib
  example: ~/share/lib/stk/2.2

A machine independent bin is not necessary as long as you don't want to
install "Stetris" and such in bin directories by default.
The machine dependent bin dir doesn't need to be hard-coded, it's just
used during make install.
The other two paths should be hard-coded with the possibility to have an
env-var overriding the default value.

About the rest of the installation, I'm not too thrilled by having buried
deeply in the lib directory a "demos" and a "man" directory.

Removing the "-f" argument (as is done in wish-4.0) would allow to use
"#!/usr/bin/env stk" as a first line for the demos, which would make
them useable directly from the source directory: copying the demos
directory to some other place would not be necessary.

Don't take me wrong: STk is nifty, but I just feel like a few details
in the installation would make things nicer.


        Stefan

PS: while I'm at it, would it be possible to drop stk, rename snow into
    stk and have tk have the same status as hash/process/etc... ?
Received on Wed Aug 23 1995 - 16:43:31 CEST