[Radiance-dev] Re: Radiance in Debian

[Thomas Bleicher]

On 3 Nov 2007, at 20:16, Bernd Zeimetz wrote:

> Creating an extra bin path is not a problem, but this makes things
> unnecessarily confusing for new Radiance users. If you'd like to  
> see the
> Radiance community grow (which is one of the reasons why I've  
> started to
> work on a package for Debian - Radiance is too good to hide it  
> somewhere
> in a small, closed community), things should be as easy as possible.

Sorry, you've lost me there. I think the point of creating a separate
path is to keep the established names while we're still able to have
everything related to Radiance in one (less common) place.

> This includes binaries in $PATH and their manpages within the manpath.

$PATH can be extended and $MANPATH can be extended.

> I've rarely seen a program which comes with such a good  
> documentation in
> form of manpages, it would be a shame to hide them, just because we  
> move
> all tools into a non-public path.

A separate path is not 'hiding' anything. In fact this seems to be the
most Unix/Radiance-like way of solving the problem

> For those people who add an extra path to their PATH anyway:
> What about creating a directory which contains the compatibility
> symlinks, so you can add this directory to your PATH?
> Like a directory /usr/lib/radiance/compat, with the following synlinks
> as contens:
>
> bin/genbox -> /usr/bin/genrbox
> bin/rview  -> /usr/bin/rvu
> share/man/man1/genbox.1.gz -> /usr/share/man/man1/genrbox.1.gz
> share/man/man1/rview.1.gz -> /usr/share/man/man1/rvu.1.gz

This implies that we do rename 'genbox' which is not necessary if there
is a separate path. And if we end up creating a 'compat' directory it
should not contain links to the real man page but a man page that  
informs
the user about the name change and advises to use the new name instead.
The binary links are necessary for existing scripts but I'm not sure if
'rview' is still necessary. It's interactive after all so everyone who
uses the wrong binary is presented with an error message as a reminder.


To come to an end: I don't thing there is a big problem with existing
scenes/scripts breaking due to the renaming of 'genbox'. I don't think
there is a big sharing of scene files going on so everyone who's new to
Radiance will write their own scenes and hopefully get a set of updated
documents to assist them. The bundled examples should be easy to update,
just as the various scripts out there (like my own). The source  
distribution
can create a link in the standard Radiance bin/ directory and expect the
users/admins to extend the path if necessary, Debian can moves these
links to another place and only hack $PATH if compatibility is desired.

We will get a few more mails to the list but as the 'rvu' experience  
shows
it's nothing we couldn't handle. All in all it seems not such a big  
problem
whatever we do.

Regards,
Thomas