The scl command is confusing

Marcela Mašláňová mmaslano at redhat.com
Mon Jan 21 07:22:08 UTC 2013


On 01/19/2013 07:40 PM, Andrew Ford wrote:
> I am giving a talk about Software Collections to my colleagues at work
> on Monday and I remembered the confusion I first had with the scl
> command. I was expecting the "scl enable" command to set up symbolic
> links or something - i.e. make some long-lasting change to the
> envionment in the way that perlbrew does, i.e. set up or enable a
> particular version of software. The word "enable" here is actually a
> misnomer, and scl is more akin to the coreutils "modified command
> invocation" commands (chroot, env, nice, nohup, etc.) - or even ssh. The
> other thing I trip over is that all arguments up to the last are
> collection names.
>
> I know that the scl command is pretty much established now, but a nicer
> syntax would be:
>
> scl-env --with perl-5.18 perl script argument ...
>
> i.e. provide the collection name as an option and let the rest of the
> command line be passed to the command to be invoked with the modified
> environment. If you want to run a command with multiple collections
> enabled then give the --with option multiple times, or provide the names
> in a single argument separated with spaces or commas, e.g.
>
> scl-env --with perl-5.18 --with mysql-5.1 perl script argument ...
>
> or
>
> scl-env --with perl-5.18,mysql-5.1 perl script argument ...
>
> Just my two cents' worth.
>
> Andrew
>
CC Jindrich for opinions.
Some improvement of scl-utils would be nice. I also would like to see 
behaviour similar to perlbrew. Anyway such changes wouldn't be good for 
stable release in EL releases.

Marcela


More information about the softwarecollections mailing list