HEPiX Version 3.0.6

This is the version file of the HEPiX scripts package for version 3.0.6.

This version is only a bug fix release for the previous version 3.0.5.

Up to know we received few feedback. One criticism is that the X11 startup is too slow. I measured it to be less than 20 seconds this morning with this version. Make sure that HEPiX is installed locally, this will decrease the remote file server overhead (AFS or NFS).

Anyway, we are working on performance issues and the code should be optimised and rationalised in the next releases.

This version fixes the following problems which affected few users.


Shell area


X11 area


Tools area

the quota-warn command can check the quota for a specificied amount of disk-space with the -s flag. Therefore you get a warning if your HOME directory free space is below 500 kB. Run

		/usr/local/lib/hepix/tools/quota-warn -h
for the help text.


Hints

We discovered the hard way that Korn shell users may have problems with HEPiX if they define the very particular ENV environment variable.

The problem is: if you define ENV to be for exmaple $HOME/.kshrc then any non-login interactive Korn shell (if you don't know this state, read the shell documentation) will execute the content of the file refered by $ENV. As HEPiX expects it to be

		/usr/local/lib/hepix/shells/hep/HEP_zshenv
you should be careful to undefine your ENV variable. Otherwise you won't inherit anything from the upper levels and it may break the login sequence, especially if you rely on some "system" aliases or functions.

The recommendation is simply to remove the setting of this environment variable from your .profile file.

This shows the limit of the Korn shell which forces users to set enviornment variables which should be managed by system managers, unless they know what they are doing.

We learned that the hard way from the experience in Chorus Experiment at CERN.


Arnaud Taddei