Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] (Jim B. Kowalkowski) · Fri, 13 Dec 1996 07:58:20 -0600

I've been reading the IP support mail messages over the last couple of
hours on tech-talk and I guess I have a question about all of it and a
few comments.  I've read through all of your stuff, so I might as well
throw my stuff out here too.

I see three basic IP developments in process, maybe four:
 1) telescope community (Andrew/Peregrine)
 2) IRM developments and other (Matthias/DESY/Fermilab)
 3) HiDEOS

My main question is this: What is the main reason that you (supporters and
users of 1 and 2) have dismissed HiDEOS?  Much (not all) of the development
in 1 and 2 has been done after the HiDEOS development.  I'm really not trying
to sell HiDEOS or anything, I just want feedback.

I think it would be nice if we could have a unified IP support package
so that everyone using IP could easily configure there system.  Look
what happens now and probably even worse in the future.  I want to
run Profibus, GPIB, and relays, I need to get the support for
all three of the above packages.  Each of these has a different
configuration mechanism.  This seems like a real hassle.

I beleive one person told me that C++ was the reason for not considering
HIDEOS.  It seems that the future direction of vxWorks (Tornado), and
in my opinion EPICS, is C++.  Look at CDEV and the portable CA server.  I
beleive that these packages would be more difficult to understand, use,
and maintain without C++.

I really wish we could discuss merging all the developments into one
package, so that everyone could benefit when a new IP module driver is
written.  It is my opinion that drivers for many of the IP modules are
not easy to write correctly.

Bill Brown:
> There was some talk at the CERN meeting about support for IP packs under
> _EPICS_ (as opposed to under HIDEOS).

I don't understand this.  Everything under HIDEOS runs under EPICS. 
Basically HiDEOS is the drv support and there is dev support for the
particular modules.

Jim

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System