Re: Making demo programs more evident...

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Friday 07 May 2004 11:57 am, Daniel J Sebald wrote:

Dan, 

I assume you are talking about unix-like systems.

> Here is the thing.  If I have su privilege I can just change to the
> "demo" directory, run "gnuplot", type "load 'all.dem'" and away we go.

I don't understand this.  Why would you have to be superuser to
run the demos?

>  But someone who hasn't installed the program, but rather just logs into
> an account and types "gnuplot" will not know where to go for the demos.

Surely that is an issue of proper installation.  If the system is properly
configured, then default the when a user logs in the environmental
variable GNUPLOT_LIB is set to the demo dir and everything should
work transparently.    Now admittedly we leave this up to the packagers
of specific gnuplot variants rather than making it part of gnuplot's own
"make install" command.  The linux rpms I have seen put the demos
in /usr/share/doc/gnuplot-VERSION/demo/ so I would expect that 
when a new user logs in that is what he gets as GNUPLOT_LIB.


>  Neither will he or she be able to run the complete set of demos if, in
> fact, they are found... unless they are smart enough to copy the demos
> to their own account.

This just isn't true.  Yes, someone with write privilege has to run "make"
in the demo directory in order to generate some of the data files,
but that should already have happened at install time.

> If a person without su privilege goes to the 
> directory where the demos are and loads them, at least one demo requires
> the creation of a file, which will bomb because the user doesn't have
> privilege to create a file in that directory.

"Don't do that".   Set your current directory to something normal,
and set GNUPLOT_LIB to be the directory where the demos are.

-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195