env-tool is Perl program that I initially developed with Joe Wells while working for the Church Project at Boston University. The original motivation was that it was often convienient to put any number of resources under version control: Programs, LaTeX macro pacakages, fonts, etc. However, for a user to be able to take advantage of these resources after checking them out of the repository they would need to configure their shells scripts to adjust their environment variables appropriately. Furthermore, if they moved the repository or had it checked out at a different location on a separate computer, they would need to edit their configuration again.
env-tool solves this problem by allowing configuration information, in the form of XML dot-files, to be distributed along with the resources. env-tool can then be used to scan a set of directories collecting configuration information and writing it out as a shell script the user can include in their normal configuration files.
Since then, env-tool has been adopted by the CIS unsupported software maintainers as straightforward mechanism for easily making a number of packages available to user. As part of this effort, env-tool has been cleaned up with some extra validation checks, support for defining shell aliases, optional locking, optimizations for Z-Shell, and support for debugging output and testing the validity of configurations. To my knowledge, env-tool will work with versions of Perl as old as 5.005_03, but this has not been tested recently.
For more information about invoking env-tool, run it with the option –help. For more information about how to write configuration files for env-tool run perldoc env-tool.
env-tool is licensed under the FSF General Public License. Bug fixes, improvements, and suggestions are welcome.
The latest version of env-tool can be obtained from a mercurial repository. To check it out, from the command-line run
hg clone static-http://free-the-mallocs.com/repos/env-tool/