CSF search mechanism - load .cdsinit from $HOME even if its disabled in setup.loc

Hi Holger,

The default behaviour of .cdsinit is that it is searched for in <ICinstDir>/tools/dfII/local, then the working dir and then the home dir (this mechanism predates the CSF mechanism, so it needed to be preserved as the default). It only uses CSF if you enable CSF (via the csfLookupConfig) and even then if it fails to find a .cdsinit using the CSF mechanism, it will continue to search using the standard (default) method.

So to answer your questions:

1. Because there is no "INCLUDE .cdsinit" in your csfLookupConfig, it looks in tools/dfII/local then working dir then home. Even if you did have the INCLUDE line in the csfLookupConfig, and just had "." in the setup.loc, it would still find it because no .cdsinit was found via the setup.loc locations. Note you can always do "virtuoso -nocdsinit" if  you don't want the cdsinit loading at all.
2. The csfLookupConfig is searched for in the setup.loc locations. In fact the setup.loc file is also searched for using the CSF mechanism. Commonly people define $CDS_SITE as a directory containing csfLookupConfig and setup.loc so you can customise it yourself.

Regards,

Andrew.

Hi Andrew,

more questions to get a better understanding:

1. Regarding the ".cdsenv".

Considered I have set CSF_LOAD_ENV=CSF - is it required to list the ".cdsenv" in "csfLookupConfig" or not ?

Will it change the search behavior if it is listed or not ?

2. Another thing I tried and did not work was, that I added a filename ".cdsinit_personal" to the "csfLookupConfig" and I created this file in my $HOME.

But apparently this file is not loaded - why ?  The "setup.loc" is configured to look in $HOME.

Can only "official" filenames (e.g. .cdsinit, .cdsenv, ...) added to "csfLookupConfig" and no other arbitrary filenames ?

3. Currently I am loading "display.drf" via a command in ".cdsinit":

drLoadDrf("etc/cds/display.drf")
envSetVal("graphic" "drfPath" 'string "etc/cds/display.drf")

But when I am adding "display.drf" in "csfLookupConfig" AFTER .cdsinit - which display.drf has precendence ?

I assume the file loaded via csfLookupConfig will have precedence - but will the virtuoso "envSetVal(("graphic" "drfPath"...)" also be set to the later "display.drf" ?

I am trying to understand this mechanism to find the optimum solution for our environment.

Rgds.

Holger

Hi Holger,

Some answers:

1. The $CDS_LOAD_ENV=CSF is an older mechanism that predates the existence of csfLookupConfig. If you set that env var or if you add "INCLUDE .cdsenv" in the csfLookupConfig file, it has the same effect - causing the .cdsenv to be loaded from all the locations in the setup.loc. It's certainly not necessary to specify this both ways - one or the other will do.
2. The load() function in SKILL doesn't use the Cadence Search File, so it's irrelevant whether the file is in the csfLookupConfig or not. In general, it only makes sense to add known file types into the csfLookupConfig because the code looking for them has to check whether it's been enabled for CSF or not before loading using its normal mechanism. However, you could just use load(ddGetStartup(".cdsinit_personal")) which will search for the file using CSF (no need to add to csfLookupConfig for this to work). You might want to do this conditionally so that it doesn't break if the file doesn't exist anywhere:
3. Similarly drLoadDrf doesn't use the CSF mechanism (unless you called ddGetStartup in the call). An explicit load will always win over the auto-lookup mechanism. I must admit I don't know quite what happens with the drfPath variable if you set that (I'd probably just do an empirical experiment to find out). I think if this is set it uses that explicit path - but I'm not sure.

Regards,

Andrew.

Gaaahhh - yet another method to initialize virtuoso via ddGetStartup() - I am wondering how I should ever explain these mechanisms to my designers.

As you explained, a conditional load() would be required to not produce an error. Is there no function like "softload()" or so, which does not produce an error if not found ?

As my SKILL-skills are NIL, could you provide a short code snippet how I would check if a files exists and load() it ?

Gaaahhh - yet another method to initialize virtuoso via ddGetStartup() - I am wondering how I should ever explain these mechanisms to my designers.

As you explained, a conditional load() would be required to not produce an error. Is there no function like "softload()" or so, which does not produce an error if not found ?

As my SKILL-skills are NIL, could you provide a short code snippet how I would check if a files exists and load() it ?

Er, whoops. I meant to include the sample code in the answer 2 above - hit Reply too quickly. Note that ddGetStartup is not another method to initialise virtuoso - it's just a SKILL function to allow you to locate a file (of any type) using the CSF mechanism. You could use that anywhere in SKILL code that might need to locate a file in flexible locations - it could be SKILL code, it could be a file that is being read by a utility - all sorts of things.

Anyway, you'd do:

let((fileName)
  when(fileName=ddGetStartup(".cdsinit_personal")
    loadi(fileName)
  )
)

The loadi means that it will print an error if there is a problem reading the file - or an error in the file itself, but it will not stop the code in the calling location from executing. In other words, it catches any errors caused when loading the file.

Regards,

Andrew.

I have the following code to my workarea ".cdsinit" (only this code - everything else is commented out ):

printf("XXXXXXX ./.cdsinit")

let((fileName)
  when(fileName=ddGetStartup(".cdsinit")
    loadi(fileName)
  )
)

The CSF is configured to load the ".cdsinit" from my workarea and from my $HOME. The "$HOME/.cdsinit" has only this line:

printf("XXXXXXX HOME/.cdsinit")

When starting virtuoso, I reliably get a CORE DUMP !

# virtuoso &
[1]+  Segmentation fault      (core dumped) virtuoso

Does it not work with ".cdsinit" ?

Using ddGetStartup(".cdsinit_personal") it is working properly - but if I have multiple ".cdsinit_personal" - it only loads the first match (like CSF does). That is not the intention. I want to load all ".cdsinit_personal" files found - just like ".cdsenv" is loaded.

So far I did load("...cdsinit_personal") the files explicitly one after the other in explicitely given locations - but if a file is not existing it throws an error. I want to avoid this error and have a "silent" search. I just would need to check if the file exists and the load via load() or loadi(). Can you provide a code snippet ?

The reason why it's a problem with .cdsinit is because you have an infinite loop - you are loading itself, which loads itself, which loads itself, ad infinitem.

The ddGetStartup function only finds the first. There is another (currently private) function to retrieve all the files (i.e. the .cdsinit_personal in all the CSF locations) which you could loop over. I did request (via CCR 785995) that this is made public (I've not managed to convince them - not entirely sure why). So you might want to request a duplicate via customer support.

Regards,

Andrew.

I found that the following code is doing what I need:

when(  isFile(".cdsinit_personal") loadi(".cdsinit_personal"))

when(  isFile("~/.cdsinit") loadi("~/.cdsinit"))
when(  isFile("~/.cdsinit_personal") loadi("~/.cdsinit_personal"))

As said - I need to give the locations explicitely.

Do you see any issue with this ?

Should be fine - you only need to make sure you don't  end up in a loop - probably wouldn't. I might be tempted to make the first one use "./.cdsinit_personal" (in both the isFile and loadi) to make sure that you don't accidentally load the wrong file if the SKILL path doesn't include "." at the beginning (isFile and load/loadi use the SKILL path - getSkillPath() to resolve local file names).

Andrew.