Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Tue, 14 Aug 2001 16:05:16 -0500

"Redman, Russell O." wrote:
> 
> I went looking for any discussion of link support in the R3.14.alpha2
> release notes and IOC Application Developer's Guide, but did not find it.
> Could Andrew or Marty comment on the state of this proposal?

Link support is currently intended for the 3.15 release.  It seems to take
us 2 years for each major EPICS release, although the last planning
meeting wanted it to come out earlier (but then it also expected 3.14.0 to
be out by now IIRC).  Certainly the code I currently have won't be in a
releasable state for at least 6 months and probably longer depending on
other workload.

BTW your requirement for a conversion where the raw value is neither 2's
complement nor unsigned is a rather specialist thing that you should solve
using a calc record - this may also make it slightly more obvious to
anyone reading the database that this is a strange value before
conversion.

> I feel some urgency in the answer to this question.  My project has to be
> essentially completed in the next year, and a great deal of the database
> will be written in the next few months.  I have been waiting hopefully for
> the last year for R3.14 to be officially released, and it has not yet
> escaped from alpha status.  Link support seems likely to be even more
> delayed.

There shouldn't be too much difficulty in converting applications from
3.13.x to 3.14 as for the main differences 3.14 does have compatibility
features in it.  The database won't need to change much if at all between
the two.  You haven't said whether you need to run IOCs on anything other
than vxWorks, and if not then I would start now with 3.13.4 and switch to
3.14 at some convenient time for you after it's come out (note that
version .0 of any software package is liable to have some problems that
alpha and beta testing haven't found - you probably don't want to help us
find those if you don't need to).

- Andrew
-- 
The world is such a cheerful place when viewed from upside-down
It makes a rise of every fall, a smile of every frown

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System