Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Arnaud Bertrand <arnaud.bertrand AT apvsys.org>]

Hello sm-discuss,

I'm the author of ApVSys and it seems that the documentation and/or
the examples are not clear enough for new users. There is some points to
clarify.

It is absolutely not necessary to prepend the command with apv. There
is NO difference between calling directly the command and calling the
command through ApVSys.

If you have /apv/bin in the begining of your path and you type:
gcc --version
and you will get the answer of gcc, e.g.
2.95.3

For the end-user point of view, it does not change anything

Here is a summary of the goal and advantages of ApVSys:
Actually, ApVSys has 4 major goals:

- Provide an access to all the available (installed) tools without any
setting or constraint for the end-users. (No modification of the PATH,
LD_LIBRARY_PATH, ...)
- Automatic selection of the binary corresponding to the used platform.
- Parallel usage of multiple versions of the same tools (e.g.
gcc/v2.95.3 and gcc/v3.2.1)
- Centralization of environment setting for tools if needed (typically
license file, site parameters, ...)

Furthermore, the manpage/infopage are synchronized with the selected
version and when a command is started using apvsys, the
LD_LIBRARY_PATH is dynimically updated to include the library of the
correct version of the tool started.

So, for the end-users, there is only one thing to do: add "/apv/bin" in
the beginning of their PATH and that's all!

Now, about installation and administration, the effort is really
negligeable (if one version of gcc and perl are properly installed)

It takes really 5 minutes maximum:

Here are the steps:

*** Only needed for the first insatllation:
- su - 
- mkdir /ap
- mkdir /ap/apvroot
- chown apvadmin /ap/apvroot (optional but beter)

*** Intallation
- su - apvadmin (optional but beter)
- cd /tmp
- tar zxvf apvsys-v1.10
- cd apvsys-v1.10
- ./install-apvsys.sh

Answer the 2 or 3 questions

That's all, apvsys is installed. Now, to have an easy way to use it, I
recommand to do (not mandatory but really beter):

- ln -s /ap/apvroot/`uname -s`/v`uname -r`/etc/links /apv

ApVSys is now operational. You have just to add /apv/bin in the
beginning of your PATH

Of course, you have now to register the tools/versions that you want to
make available via ApVSys. But again, it takes a few seconds. Here is an
example:

Suppose you have ncftp installed for your platform in /ap/ncftp-3.1.5

- cd /ap/ncftp-3.1.5
- apv-linktool -t ncftp -v 3.1.5 -L arn
- apv-regtool -t ncftp -v3.1.5 -L arn
(note, arn is my login name) 

And that's all! ncftp is now available with apvsys. It means that a
default version (3.1.5 in this case) of ncftp is available for all the
users having /apv/bin in their PATH. These users can type "ncftp
ftp.gnu.org" to start the tool exactly like they should do if their PATH
contained /ap/ncftp-3.1.5/bin.

If you have other version of the same tool you can re-do exactly the
same operation. You (the apvadmin) can easily change the default version
with the "apv-setdefault" command. And the end-user can easily change
the used version by editing his "$HOME/.tool-spec" file. 

For more details you can read the documentation
http://apvsys.sourceforge.net and the examples
http://apvsys.sourceforge.net/apv-example1.html (or you can
ask me via e-mail.)

To conclude, I just repeat that for the end-user there is NO difference
for the usage of the tools except that they have an access to all the
command of all the tools with only one PATH: /apv/bin.

I hope it is more clear now. Don't hesitate to contact me if you have
any question.



-- 
Best regards,
 Arnaud                          mailto:arnaud.bertrand AT apvsys.org