Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Benjamin Franksen <[email protected]> · Sat, 11 Jul 2015 12:15:34 +0200

Hello everyone

I am happy to have received an offer from Freddie Akeroyd 
<[email protected]> who will from now on act as co-maintainer for the 
Sequencer. The web site will be updated accordingly and I hope we can soon 
bring you new releases that smoothly build and test on Windows.

Cheers
Ben

Am Donnerstag, 9. Juli 2015, 21:07:57 schrieb Benjamin Franksen:
> I am writing to all interested parties as the current maintainer and
> main developer of the EPICS sequencer. The problem is:
> 
> (1) Seemingly harmless changes to the code organization or in the build
> system (i.e. Makefiles) have the tendency to break the build on Windows.
> 
> (2) Similarly, running the tests can also easily break on Windows due to
> differences in the way processes are started and stopped.
> 
> (3) Now and then I forget to avoid gcc'isms (mostly stuff that's not in
> the C90 standard) which break when trying to compile with native C
> compilers (like Visual Studio).
> 
> I have not done any serious work on Windows for years (perhaps decades).
> My original hope was that I would get some in-house support, i.e. people
> here at HZB who would set up the VMs I need for testing (Windows7 in 32
> and 64 bit, both with Mingw and native compiler), but that did not work
> out. Which means that, for now and in the forseeable future, I will not
> be able to test or even build on Windows, so I cannot rightfully claim
> to support it as a build and target platform for the sequencer. For a
> while Mark River has acted as de-facto co-maintainer (many thanks for
> that!) but his time is understandably limited, given the large number of
> projects he is responsible for.
> 
> This is why I am asking for a volunteer to act as a co-maintainer of the
> sequencer for the Windows side.
> 
> Your job would be to
> 
> (a) Notify me whenever building or running the tests breaks on Windows.
> Ideally this should be automated by extending the Jenkins build farm
> (which is currently maintained by Andrew Johnson) to cover the several
> Windows variants. But even with that, it doesn't make sense for me to
> publish patch after patch waiting hours in between until I find that I
> made a stupid error in a Perl script.
> 
> (b) Help me to react to reports from users about such problems: try to
> reproduce the problem, find out its cause, share your findings (or lack
> of them) with me and the user.
> 
> (c) Try to come up with a solution. Ideally send me a patch that solves
> it. Failing that, collaborate with me via email (or otherwise, perhaps
> meet in a chatroom) exchanging analysis and patches until we get it
> working again.
> 
> You should have Windows machines (VM or real) readily available and
> configured to allow building the sequencer and running the testsuite,
> ideally in (at least) the four variants I listed above. It would be
> perfect if you (or your colleagues) actually used the sequencer on
> Windows because some problems only come up in the real world and/or are
> hard to test automatically.
> 
> It is not necessary to be imtimately familiar with the code base itself,
> as I expect most problems to be of the sort described above: build
> failures and failures in the test system. I will of course help with
> getting started and will answer questions about the code, the build
> system, how the tests work etc, whenever they arise.
> 
> Being available on short notice is also not a requirement: the work can
> usually be postponed a week or two (or longer if necessary) until we
> both have enough time available. But at some point there must be the
> possibility to tightly work together for as long as it takes to fix
> things. (If we are in different time zones this period might stretch
> over a few days.) I expect the need for this kind of close collaboration
> to arise only occasionally, perhaps every few months, with long
> stretches of nothing (noticeable) happening in between.
> 
> If nobody volunteers I fear I'll have to remove any claim (in the
> documentation) that the sequencer supports Windows as a target or build
> platform, acknowlegding what has for a while been the state of things:
> if it breaks on Windows you are (more or less) on your own. Of course I
> will continue to apply patches people send me when they find a fix for a
> problem on Windows, provided it doesn't break anything on Linux.
> 
> Cheers
> Ben

-- 
"Make it so they have to reboot after every typo." ― Scott Adams

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System