Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Bill Lavender <[email protected]> · Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:16:33 -0500

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 09:28:16AM -0700, Jameson Graef Rollins wrote:
> Hello, folks.
> 
> 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. 

> 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?

The debian-xray.iit.edu one is run by one of my bosses (Carlo Segre).
It has been used at several beamlines at the APS and one at the ALS
without any trouble.

> 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.

Carlo is an official Debian developer, so he would be in a position
to submit them.  There are some differences in filesystem layout.  Both
sets of packages put user binaries in /usr/bin, libraries in /usr/lib,
and so forth.  However IIT include files are in /usr/include/epics,
while NSLS-2 include files are in /usr/lib/epics/include.

One major difference is that the IIT packages do not attempt to package
iocCore related stuff, while the NSLS-2 packages _do_ package it, with
the results apparently all living in the /usr/lib/epics directory.  The
Debian community tends to strongly resist packages that put site-specific
configuration information under /usr/lib and would probably insist that
it go under /etc.

My suspicion is that it would be relatively straightforward to get Debian
packages accepted that implemented the client-side parts of EPICS.  However,
the layout of iocCore is very different from the way that Debian packaging
standards expect, so you might get a lot of pushback from the Debian
community over iocCore.

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

The IIT repository includes Medm.  The NSLS-2 repository includes Edm.
Neither repository includes both.

Bill Lavender

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System