Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] (Marty Kraimer) · Thu, 18 Jan 1996 10:37:56 -0600

> From [email protected] Thu Jan 18 10:00 CST 1996
> From: Andrew Johnson <[email protected]>
> To: Marty Kraimer <[email protected]>
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Doc: Link Field Syntax
> Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 15:57:07 +0000 (GMT)
> Priority: NORMAL
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> Marty,
> 
> Can I make a suggestion about hardware addressing for a future ascii database 
> release, resulting from my having written a number of drivers in recent months?  
> 
> I found the standard address types available to be somewhat restricting, so for 
> more than one driver I ended up using INST_IO to provides a string which I could 
> then parse for myself in the device or driver layer.  What would be really good 
> would be a way of allowing the device layer to define what format a hardware 
> address should take, rather than providing a fixed number of formats as at 
> present.
> 
> Obviously existing device support doesn't expect this, so it would probably be 
> necessary to provide the current formats to existing drivers somehow without 
> having to change them.  I haven't really thought about how you might specify the 
> address format, but it is something which I think could be incorporated into the 
> (very worthwhile IMHO) work you're doing.

This is an area where we know EPICS is deficient. We have had a LOT of discussion
about this topic. epicsRX was a failed attempt to, amoung other things,
solve this problem. We have not been able to agree on a good solution.
I do think we should, in the future, make another attempt.

Marty Kraimer

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System