On 23 Dec 2005 18:34:28 +0100, Thomas Walter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 2005-12-23 at 01:59, Christian Holm Christensen wrote: >> In my humble opinion, wrapper scripts are ugly. That said, I could >> imagine that it would be the best solution (for now) to package GEANT 4 >> - it's a mess when it comes to environment variables. However, in the >> long run, it'd probably be better to lobby for cleaning the code of >> environment variables - after all, GEANT 4 is really a library, not a >> specific application.
I agree the wrapper scripts are ugly -- unfortunately I can't think of any other way to satisfy both Geant's need for environment variables and Debian Policy's ban on them. Also, my packages won't force the user to use the wrapper scripts -- s/he can instead set the environment variables at login time automatically (if s/he wants) just by sourcing a specific shell file. Check out the README.Debian in the source package of geant4 (deb-src URL was given earlier in this thread). I further agree that upstream should switch away from environment variables entirely, but it sometimes seems like a lot of physicists have a strange addiction to them. Must be due to the field's FORTRAN heritage where it was non-trivial to write programs that can read command-line flags. > What's about the idea to switch to init files? > A default in /etc and also a user init file in $HOME. > But then it looks more like to be implemented by upstream. The file debian/defaults/geant4 in my source package, which gets installed as /etc/default/geant4 in the binary .deb of geant4-common, and can be copied to $HOME/.geant4-defaults, is for exactly this purpose. :-) The logic that translates these variables into Geant 4 environment variables is in debian/scripts/g4defaults.sh and opengl.sh, each of which is sourced (if it exists) from debian/scripts/env.sh (installed as /usr/share/geant4/env.sh in the geant4-common .deb). In turn, env.sh is sourced from the g4make and g4run wrapper scripts, or (if the user so desires) from the user's shell login files. Note that the installation directory env. variables like $G4LIB are set automatically in env.sh with no user intervention needed. Indeed, since the Debian packages would always install files to specific locations, there is no need for these to be user-settable. Just the "USE" flags, etc. such as $G4UI_USE_XM would be set through /etc/default/geant4 or ~/.geant4-defaults. best regards, -- Kevin B. McCarty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Physics Department WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
