Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] (William Lupton) · Wed, 25 Oct 95 14:52:13 HST

I promise that this will be short... I find myself agreeing with almost all
that John Winans says. Some brief notes:

1. I mentioned DRAMA in order to be even-handed. I agree with John's comments.

2. As a matter of interest, why is the time stamp not the 11th quark? Is it
   never required along with graphic or control information?

3. The severity quark is fine for VALID / INVALID. The status quark has the
   problem that it is 16 bits and not easily extensible, hence much of the
   discussion to date. A message string quark would need to be more than a
   canned translation of the status

4. There is, I think, a distinction between a status which comes back to a
   client in a transaction response and a status which is part of a record's
   state.

5. I would happily throw out the requirement that status codes be converted
   to message text. It has been interest in upwards compatibility which has
   kept that alive. All along we have agreed that it is text which flows on
   the wire.

6. Small subsystem-specific error codes still don't address the "package A
   calls routine in package B which calls routine in package C which fails"
   problem unless B converts all C codes to B codes before forwarding them
   to A (which is a bit of a pain for B; I've several times written systems
   which were low-level and returned things like NULL to indicate failure,
   only to have to invent error codes at the next level up and to wish I'd
   done the job properly in the first place).

William

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System