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Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history
From: |
Juergen Sauermann |
Subject: |
Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history |
Date: |
Fri, 04 Jul 2014 14:47:44 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130330 Thunderbird/17.0.5 |
Hi David et al.,
I believe your proposal below does not work in general. Often (if not to
say normally)
GNU APL is installed by root, so $HOME would be /root. I believe most
system administrators
would not like programs to install config files there (and it would not
even be readable by
other users).
And likewise, most users will not like it if a new GNU APL installation
overrides their preferences file.
The current strategy is to not install anything in any $HOME directory
and I believe that is good so.
The preferences file below /etc belongs to the installation while the
preferences file in $HOME belongs
to the user. That is a clear cut of responsibilities and also of file
access permissions.
And then there is the question of the default value for
READLINE_HISTORY_PATH
in the preferences file. The default value of libreadline for its
history is ~/.history.
That was the first thing that annoyed me because it puts the histories
of different
programs into the same history file. Rather useless IMHO.
The next level would be a per binary file for the history like
~/.apl-history as proposed
by Blake and also preferred by Elias. On the other hand, apparently
David and definitely
myself prefer the current solution which is the current directory for
the history file. The
way I am working is to have different directories for different APL
related tasks. And
when I work on one task then I do NOT want the history of other tasks to
be mixed together.
I sometimes open the history file to see what I did before. With a mix
of different
APL sessions in the same file that would be close to impossible.
Another complication with $HOME/.apl-history is that the preferences
file is a plain text
file and not a shell script. Therefore environment variable expansion
like $HOME would
require a parser for the preferences file which understands $HOME (or ~
for that matter).
Compared to that, all that those who want everything in one file need to
do is to put the
location of that file into the user's preferences file (the one below
$HOME). As we have
seen earlier different users seem to have different preferences as to
where the preferences
file should be located (under $HOME/.gnu-apl/ vs.
$HOME/.config/gnu-apl). That tells me that
different people have different opinions about such things and that it
is better to leave it to the
user to set things up herself.
For all those reasons, I believe it is better to leave things as they are.
/// Jürgen
On 07/02/2014 09:08 PM, David B. Lamkins wrote:
While I agree that $HOME/.apl-history is more generally useful, I can
also make a case for having the history file's location be relative to
the working directory:
Assume that you're a consultant or contractor working on APL projects
for a number of clients. You cd to the directory for a client's project,
start up APL, and do your work for that client. The history file remains
specific to that client/directory, which is probably what you'd prefer
in that situation.
Here's my proposal...
Have the installer and the Makefile's install target do the following:
1. Confirm that $HOME exists.
2. Install $HOME/.gnu-apl/preferences from the template.
3. Edit the user's preference file to set READLINE_HISTORY_PATH using
the absolute path to $HOME.
This should address Blake's concern about keeping the installation
process simple, provide what (I think) is the more useful general case
while not precluding other choices, and have a reasonable fallback on
platforms that don't set $HOME.
- Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history, (continued)
- Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history, Elias Mårtenson, 2014/07/02
- Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history, Blake McBride, 2014/07/02
- Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history, Elias Mårtenson, 2014/07/02
- Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history, Blake McBride, 2014/07/02
- Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history, Elias Mårtenson, 2014/07/02
- Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history, Blake McBride, 2014/07/02
- Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history, Elias Mårtenson, 2014/07/02
- Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history, Blake McBride, 2014/07/02
- Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history, Elias Mårtenson, 2014/07/02
- Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history, David B. Lamkins, 2014/07/02
- Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history,
Juergen Sauermann <=
- Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history, Juergen Sauermann, 2014/07/02
- Re: [Bug-apl] .apl.history, Blake McBride, 2014/07/02