The Aesop System

Checking out Aesop

This document describes the procedure used to create a new workspace for Aesop development. This assumes that you've already been given appropriate permissions by the aesop administrator (i.e., by sending me e-mail at kompanek@cs) and that you're familiar with CVS.

Checkout Procedure

This procedure is simply as follows: First, if you're doing any ABLE development (not necessarily working on Aesop), you'll need to: If you aren't going to be doing any Aesop development but want to run the Aesop demo, you'll need to copy /afs/cs/project/able/lib/default_sm_config to "$HOME/.sm_config". This is the configuration file needed by the database client library used by Aesop.

To do development on Aesop, you'll need to configure a workspace and checkout the system from CVS:

Development

If you will be creating a new (private) style, you'll need to edit your local version of lib/styles.dir to add the style. The file ui/styles.dir in CVS can be commited when the new style is ready for public consumption. Note that if FCL_LIBRARY is already set to the main library (/afs/cs/project/able/aesop/lib), it won't find your local version -- unsetting FCL_LIBRARY before running the aesop startup script, will force aesop to look in your library directory.

The following environment variables are used by aesop. All of these have defaults which are set by ablesetup.csh, which you may want to override if you're making local changes to source libraries. This is a subset of the environment variables actually used by Aesop. The complete list of Aesop environment variables is described in README_ENVIRONMENT in the toplevel "aesop" module.

AESOP_HOME This is the root of the aesop distribution and will default to your own "aesop" directory if you run "aesop" FROM WITHIN the ui directory. FCL_LIBRARY This should be the lib directory underneath aesop. Aesop looks in /afs/cs/project/able/aesop/lib if it is not defined. Set this to your own lib directory if to see local modifications to the lib dir (including the 'styles.dir' file). ABLE_REPOSITORY This is a code library used by the system. If you're editing the repository this should be point toward your own copy. If not set, aesop looks for the repository in $AESOP_HOME/repository.