sPHENIX discussion of software

[bxia <bxia AT rcf.rhic.bnl.gov>]

Hi, software administrators and bash users,

Today I found OFFLINE_MAIN was not set up correctly after sourcing 
/opt/sphenix/core/bin/sphenix_setup.sh. So I took a look into this 
script, and one line caught my attention. In Line 130, this test goes 
into the "else" cluase in today's environment setting. I know little 
about sPHENIX directory structure, so I'm not sure if this is the 
intension of this script. But this bahavior is a little tricky when the 
variable is not set or empty (I mean a string of zero length) in the 
test. It's worthy a mention. According to bash's manpage, this result 
should be the same as the non-POSIX [[ ]], but these two give different 
results. I know bash's behavior changes with versions sometimes, so this 
test might have behaved differently in previous version.

Also, I found a bug which is irrelavent to this issue. Line 59 tries to 
get the base directory set by users, however this should be placed 
inside the case when -b is given. If not, by the end of the day, we get 
"ne" in Line 3 when -b is not set by users. If there is a directory "ne" 
in the current directory by change (usually it is our home directory), 
the bug will surface at the test in Line 134.

Thank you for taking time for this and for providing an official bash 
setup script.

Bing