Yorick for Debian
-----------------

This is the `Yorick' interpreted language by David H. Munro, prepackaged for
Debian GNU/Linux.

This package was put together by Thibaut Paumard <thibaut.paumard@free.fr>
from the sourceforge CVS sources. The changes are regularly committed back to
the CVS.


1) Documentation
2) Configuration
3) Add-ons
4) Relocation
5) Suppressed material
6) Additional documentation


1) Documentation
----------------

The homepage is full-featured with an active forum, bug-tracker etc.

   http://yorick.sourceforge.net

Install the yorick-doc package for off-line documentation. It contains
the Yorick Manual and Quick-Reference Cards in HTML and PDF formats,
as well as HTML documentation for all the Yorick functions installed
on your system. By default, this documentation is updated each time
you install, update, or remove Yorick or a Yorick add-on package. See
the `update-yorickdoc'command in the yorick-doc package if this is not
what you want, or if this does not work for some reason.


2) Configuration:
-----------------

 * System-wide:

Any .i script found in /etc/yorick/ will be sourced by Yorick on start-up (in
alphabetic order). Use this for system-wide configuration.


 * Per-user:

Each user can have one user directory, one of ~/.yorick, ~/yorick and
~/Yorick. If you have several of them and want to know which one Yorick is
using , look at the Y_USER variable. Any .i script found in Y_USER/i-start/
will be sourced by Yorick on start-up (in alphabetic order). This can be used
for user-level configuration.

Additionally, Yorick will look for custom.i in the path. This can be used for
"task-level" customizations by putting a custom.i in the directory from which
you start Yorick for a given task.



3) Add-ons:
-----------

There are useful interpreted libraries as well as compiled plug-ins available
around the net (see e.g. http://www.maumae.net), some of which are packaged
for Debian.

By default, the Debian package of Yorick is configured in such way that its
package manager (pkg_mngr.i) will install packages under
/usr/local/lib/yorick. See README.Debian.packages for details. Users can take
inspiration from this file to install packages in their home directories.



4) Relocation:
--------------

This build of Yorick is relocatable. This means that you can keep a functional
copy of this version e.g. before upgrading by simply copying the entire
/usr/lib/yorick directory anywhere. If you do that:
  - make sure you dereference symbolic links (-L option to cp);
  - you may want to remove i-start/zzdebian.i, which makes an
    `include_all,"/etc/yorick";';
  - you may also want to have a look at packages/pkg_setup.i
    and check whether it does something useful for you (you probably want to
    delete it).
  - the yorick binary is in bin/; you may set up a symbolic link, but you
    cannot change the layout of the directory tree or move the real executable
    out.


5) Suppressed material
----------------------

Due to some copyright incompatibilities, a few files have been removed from
the upstream source. Most of them do not get used in the standard Linux build
anyway and are therefore useless for the Debian package (see copyright file
for details).

The exception is idlsave.i, that can be used to read "save" files from the
commercial software Interactive Data Language (IDL) from Research System
Inc. (RSI). It is legal for an IDL user to use and distribute this file, but
it might be problematic for Debian to ship it.

If you need to exchange data between IDL and Yorick, I suggest you look at a
standard file format: FITS is supported out-of-the-box by Yorick, HDF5 thanks
to the yorick-hdf5 plug-in. If you really need idlsave.i, grab it from the CVS
web interface, as of writing:
 http://yorick.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/yorick/yorick/i/idlsave.i
and put it anywhere in your path (e.g. /usr/local/lib/yorick/i/ for
system-wide install, ~/.yorick/ for per-user install).


Thibaut Paumard <paumard@users.sourceforge.net>,  
Sat, 29 Dec 2007 15:31:24 +0100
