Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Wed, 20 Apr 2011 12:29:11 -0500

Hi Jamie,

On Wednesday 20 April 2011 11:28:16 Jameson Graef Rollins wrote:
> 
> I will be installing epics and medm on a bunch of Ubuntu workstations
> and I was wondering about the state of Debian and Ubuntu packages and
> repositories.  I found this launchpad project:
> 
> https://launchpad.net/epics
> 
> but I was unclear if there was an Ubuntu repository associated with it.

There are a few EPICS projects with Bazaar repo's associated with the EPICS 
project group on launchpad; they are all linked under the Projects section on 
that page.  As you probably saw though, they really only cover EPICS Base 
itself, and none of them provide a PPA that you can use to install EPICS from.  
Our build system wasn't designed with the needs of distro packaging in mind, 
but we are slowly moving in the direction of making that possible.

At the APS and many other sites the workstations get to EPICS by mounting a 
partition on a central file-server.  If we were going to change that here we'd 
use RPM packages since our official Linux distro is RHEL.  I would like to 
move towards distro packaging, but it's not a priority for my group.

> Which led me to these repositories:
> 
> http://epics.nsls2.bnl.gov/debian/
> http://debian-xray.iit.edu/
> 
> What is the status of these repos?  They both seem fairly uptodate.  Are
> they fairly dependable?

I don't know anything about the iit.edu repo; the one at NSLS-2 is managed by 
Michael Davidsaver and I believe is used for installations at NSLS-2.

> Would it possible to just upload these packages directly to Debian or
> Ubuntu?  Are there any licensing issues?  I would be thrilled if we
> could just get these packages in the Debian/Ubuntu mainline.

I'm not aware of any licensing issues.  Michael can respond to his plans for 
including them in Debian, but I don't remember anyone talking about Ubuntu as 
such.

> PS. Do any of these repositories also included medm packages?

I'm not aware that anyone has packaged any of our EPICS extensions, but I'd 
certainly be interested in hearing about any attempts.  If you have experience 
and can help with packaging it would be worth having a discussion about it 
here on tech-talk.

- Andrew
-- 
An error is only a mistake if you don't learn from it.
When you learn something from it, it becomes a lesson.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System