Minutes of CSuite workshop

Chase 319
April 3, 1996, 4:30 pm

Next meeting April 10, 1996
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Agenda

Minutes
Book Selection (David Trueman)
Documentation (David Potter)

Minutes

Need a volunteer for next week. Perhaps a standard rotation?

Book Selection

We want to assemble a list of suggested references on the topics listed below. This will form a reference list for us, and other sites trying to install Csuite. We may decide to bundle the books with a CDROM of the software in our turn-key distribution process. Once we settle on a list, we can start to refer to this 'documentation' in our manuals and worry less about how much detail we include in our docs.
Suggested topics:

Unix System administration
HTML
Internet information systems (httpd, news, etc.) (e.g. from O'Reily)
Linux ?
[g]awk, sed, etc?

Documentation

We should be working on documentation suitable/needed for the distribution (the alpha 3 or 4 release). This will include (in a couple weeks?)

existing Help Desk, sanitized -- Andrew Irwin is working on this
installation documentation
FAQ for common problems -- assembed with day-to-day experience and also from installation experience

There was some discussion about the current problems with CSuite. We discussed the need for 3 (or more) machines: one for production (ccn), one for development (csuite), and one per OS for distribution (to be scared up before next Wednesday; details to ephemeral for minutes).

Several things are still broken on CSuite, and it is our goal to get them working, or long term problems identified, in the next month. This 'development' will happen on the (to be found) distribution machine. Our major task will be to sanitize the scripts (see below) using the variables in $CS_ROOT/vars[1]: path names and displayed text are the main priorities.
Other problems which may arise: tput init does not work on Linux? reset alternative?

There was also some discussion of the PDA and distribution. Several strongly held opinions were voiced. Link to our PDA pages and not distribute binaries? Include only some of the popular packages? Perhaps we could think of a 'small build' and 'full build' option depending on the choice of the user and amount of disk space to be sacrificed. In any case, we must get rid of our copies of Netscape, as we are not allowed to redistribute it.

A brief overview of the executables directories was given; a full list of all 153 scripts is available. Read over this list and the detailed list, and indicate in that document which you would like to adopt to sanitize/document.

bin/: is user programs; will become lynx-exec
lynxcgi-bin/: lynx cgi programs
?: shell, lynx, pine; will become bin/
/opt/bin/: gawk, agrep, sed, perl, and other tools used in scripts
lib/: auxillary programs, don't write HTML out
ip-bin/: IP scripts
cgi-bin/: standard httpd served cgi
cgi-lib/: auxillary programs, write HTML out
cgi-rlib/: programs for privileged users
cgi-office/: Office support
cgi-man/: ?
cgi-*/: and not already mentioned: other cgi

We agreed that the fastest (and perhaps best) way to get this important work done is for many of us to work in parallel. We hope to start in about 1 week; shortly after the distribution machine is found and set up with Linux and alpha3 from ccn. Some important notes:

once work has begun, it is important to not work on production (ccn) scripts, or effort will be wasted
document your changes with rcs. Just 'ci' and 'co' the files.
It would be very nice to have a standard set of instructions/conventions for each of us to follow while sanitizing the scripts. While this may mostly just an annotated vars file; some other information will be useful:
- An elaboration of USER_PATH, CGI_PATH, MEM_PATH so everyone is clear on which is which; this will eliminate all hard-coded paths in the scripts
- conventions for standard text to use; perhaps all this is in vars.
- documentation on cgi headers and footers (button bars)
- elaboration of vars (or just a copy of vars): WEBHOST, MAILHOST, SHORT_NAME, LONG_NAME, MED_NAME.
This should be useful not only for fixing things, but also for future script writers: providing a guide to follow. This way, each person now and in the future, will do the same thing (until the guidelines change!)

Next meeting April 4, 1996

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