Configuring Your Workstation
Once your worstation is installed, it is time for you to
configure it. At this point you create a user for working
everyday, configure third party repositories, set environment
variables to fit your personal needs, download the working
copy of &TCAR; and prepare it for start using it.
Define Your Workplace
Once you've installed the workstation and it is up and
running, you need to register the user name you'll use for
working. In this task you need to use the commands
useradd and passwd to
create the user name and set a password for it, respectively.
These commands require administrative privileges to be
executed, so you need to login as root
superuser for doing so.
Do not use the root username for regular
tasks inside your working copy of &TCAR;. This is dangerous
and might provoke unreversable damages to your workstation.
When you've registered your user name in the workstation, it
provides an identifier for you to open a user's session in the
workstation and a place to store the information you produce,
as well. This place is known as your home directory and is
unique for each user registered in the workstation. For
example, if you register the user name john in your
workstation, your home directory would be located at /home/john/.
At this point it is important to define where to download the
working copy of &TCAR; inside your home directory. This
desition deserves special attention and should be implemented
carefully in order to grant a standard environment that can be
distributed. Let's see some alternatives.
Different Absolute Paths
Consider that you store your working copy under /home/john/Projects/artwork/ and
I store mine under /home/al/Projects/artwork/, we'll
end up refering the same files inside our working copies
through different absolute paths. This alternative generates
a contradiction when files which hold path information inside
are committed up to the central repository from different
working copies. The contradiction comes from the question:
which is the correct absolute path to use inside such files,
yours or mine? (None of them is, of course.)
One Unique Absolute Path
Another case would be that where you and I ourselves use one
unique home directory (e.g., /home/centos/Projects/artwork/)
to store the working copy of &TCAR; in our own workstations,
but configure the subversion client to use different user
names to commit changes up from the working copy to the
central repository. This alternative might be not so good in
situations where you and I have to share the same workstation.
In such cases, it would be required that we both share the
password information of the same system user (the
centos user in our example) which, in
addition, gives access to that user's subversion client
configuration and this way provokes the whole sense of using
different subversion credentials for committing changes to be
lost.
Different Absolute Paths Through Dynamic Expansion
Most of the absolute paths we use inside the working copy are
made of two parts, one dynamic and one relative fixed. The
dynamic part is the home directory of the current user and its
value can be retrived from the $HOME
environment variable. The fixed part of the path is the one
we set inside the repositroy structure itself as a matter of
organization. What we need here is to find a way to expand
variables inside files that don't support variable expansion.
This alternative had worked rather fine when we produce
produce PNG files from SVG files and XTHML from DocBook files,
but the same is not true for absolute paths inside files that
are used as in their permanent state inside the repository
(e.g., CSS files and other files similar in purpose).
Download Your Working Copy
As convenction, to use the &TCAR;, you must register the user
name centos in your workstation, do login
with it, and download the working copy from the central
repository using the following command:
svn co https://projects.centos.org/svn/artwork /home/centos/Projects/artwork
The first time you download the working copy it contains no
image files, nor documentation, or localized content inside
it. This is because all the files provided in the working copy
are source files (e.g., the files needed to produce other
files) and it is up to you the action of render them to
produce the final files (e.g., images and documentation) used
to implement &TCPCVI;.
In order to complete the installation of your working copy,
use the prepare functionality described
in .