Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Rod Nussbaumer <[email protected]> · Wed, 16 Nov 2016 07:43:36 -0800

All:

I would like to get peoples' opinions about the right way to deal with

open source third party libraries that get bound to EPICS applications,

particularly on Linux, but wherever else it comes into play. An example

case would be libgif, which can be used by EDM to display GIF images in

EDM screens. The Area Detector package seems to make significant use of

such libraries for image processing. So far, the standard procedure here

has been to install the libraries from binary repositories supported by

OS vendors such as Redhat, Debian, etc. We do this on development hosts

and the matching production host architectures. However, this leaves us

vulnerable to incompatible changes that may be introduced due to routine

maintenance of the hosts, and silently changes the deployed EPICS

software with no knowledge of the effect, or testing that it works as

expected. The alternative would be to build from sources, all libraries

that go into an EPICS application, and install the lib binaries in a way

that they get used in lieue of the system-installed packages. Does

anyone do that? Am I being paranoid? The obvious question is how far

would you take this approach, since literally everything binds to libc,

libm, and some other standard libraries.

Thanks in advance for your opinions.

Rod Nussbaumer
TRIUMF
Vancouver, Canada

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System