[Bese-devel] Loading UCW with ucwctl, cl-launch etc

[Nathan Bird]

What? How? Seriously, I'm lost here.

 

I spent a while earlier today trying to get this installed. I got cl-launch,
the custom version of detachtty the works (I thought), no dice :-(.  I'm not
even particularly sure what all I'm missing. For the time being I've just
rolled back to before these patches so that I can continue working. 

 

Here are a few of the things that caused problems for me (and at least one
fellow newbie in #ucw today).

*	There is big benefit to using start.lisp. it runs everywhere (that I
have tried).  This is almost always how I have started UCW. Since I do all
of my work over ssh, leaving a terminal open to it generally isn't a problem
and I also have a window where I can see all the messages easily. I do
appreciate dettachtty for deployment, but unfortunately we have had only a
little opportunity to do that yet. Having this run on windows is a sometime
requirement of the setup we are trying to get going. Depending on debian
packages and such makes that harder for anyone to get it going there.
*	Multiple instances of UCW. Because I work at a windows shop, we are
developing on UCW on a shared linux server. We each have our own instance of
UCW on this server. Installing stuff to /etc doesn't work in this case.
*	Defaulting to locations that don't exist (/etc/ucw/ucwctl.conf).
Defaulting to locations inside UCW is a bit easier (especially on people
getting UCW for the first time and just wanting to see what is going on).
Can we instead default to ucw_dev/bin/etc/* ? 
*	What are the different configuration files? I think I eventually
figured this out, but my first inclination on being told that I hadn't
specified a lisp implementation, was to fill in the variable in
bin/etc/ucwctl.conf, that didn't work, I then tried specifying that file
with the -c option, to no avail. Apparently that wasn't the configuration
file the -config option was expecting. I finally got it to somewhat work by
using just about all of the command line parameters at once, and then hit
some other errors.
*	ANYTHING in the readme? The best docs I could find was reading the
shell script itself (which does have some good comments but I'm not very
good at shell script) and Luca's commit message. I couldn't find anything
specifying what files should be placed where in /etc. There are distributed
comments to this effect, but if we are supposed to be copying and editing a
bunch of stuff an installation guide would be incredibly handy.
*	"ucwctl -help" reports the option as -config-file, whereas the
script appears to actually parse -config

 

 

The biggest take away point I would like to make is that there really needs
to be a TRIVIAL way to start ucw (alright "sbcl -load start.lisp" might not
be trivial, but it is closer), that does not involve copying files to root
owned directories.

 

At least some of this probably comes from my being less familiar with "The
Way Things Work" on Linux and maybe Lisp as well. I'm still fairly new to
both of these communities. I also appreciate where this is going in trying
to make it more platform independent. But by forcing a lot more
configuration up front and assuming very platform specific paths doesn't
quite do that yet.

 

I hope this helps out, please don't take it negatively, I do understand I am
working with bleeding edge beta software here. :-D

 

Nathan Bird

 

* I hold no guarantees to the factual correctness of everything in here, it
was a frustrating day of not understanding why this wasn't working. I'm sure
I was confused on more than one thing.

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