RE: CA Commandline Tools

["Jeff Hill" <johill@lanl.gov>]

Ralph,

Sorry about the delayed reply. I was on vacation Thursday and Friday of
last week and also this Monday.

I agree that some simple command line CA client tools in the portable
base distribution would be useful. I frequently discover that I can not
use some of the command line tools on WIN32 because over time their
maintainers have allowed them to sprout UNIX dependencies. This problem
is periodically fixed, but seems to chronically come back. It also seems
that there should be some simple CA test programs conveniently available
after building base but before getting extensions built even on UNIX,
and as a porting aid to new OSs such as Mac OS X. Some of the simplest
CA command line tools were changed several years back to call EZCA. I'm
not sure why such simple programs need to be dependent on EZCA?

Many of these programs used to be in base a long time ago, but when we
separated the base distribution from extensions a decision was made to
arbitrarily eliminate all code from base that linked with the CA client
library. In hindsight this appears to have been a mistake.

In R3.14 I am providing the following simple command line CA diagnostic
tools.
o acctst
o catime
o caeventrate
o casw

All of these are documented in the R3.14 CA reference manual, and it
seems to me that any additional CA client tools provided in base should
also be documented in that manual. The manual is written in HTML and can
be easily modified on your OS of choice with amaya.

Jeff

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ralph.Lange@mail.bessy.de [mailto:Ralph.Lange@mail.bessy.de]
> Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2002 8:26 AM
> To: Stephanie Allison; Janet Anderson; Bob Dalesio; Jeff Hill; Andrew
> Johnson; Kay-Uwe Kasemir; timo.korhonen@psi.ch; Marty Kraimer;
> eric.norum@usask.ca
> Subject: CA Commandline Tools
>
> Hi all,
>
> I would suggest adding a small set of (existing) CA commandline tools
to
> base.
>
> Motivation:
>
> Working with Marty's test suite (mrkSoftTest) I found that it silently
> relies on 'caput' being in the user's PATH. When I added the path to
> caput, the test crashed helplessly. Trying to find the reason I
realized
> that just at BESSY there are at least three different applications
> floating around that share the name caput. Command line args and
> functionality are of course different and incompatible.
>
> After building Base and creating the example application, there is no
> command line tool that one could use to see what's happening on the
> IOC. The display manager and the alarm handler have to be built in
order
> to check database functionality. This is bad.
>
> I would suggest adding the five standard tools which I couldn't live
> without:
>
> caput
> caget
> camonitor
> caputacks
> caputackt
>
> All with the most simple interface: flags and PV name(s) on the
command
> line. No PV files and stuff, just plain debugging tools that allow
drag
> and drop of PV names from screens to the command line etc.
>
> I volunteer to collect and check-in reasonable versions of those
> programs into BASE/src/util - there shouldn't be any real maintenance
> issues unless the CA interface dramatically changes.
>
> Should I do so?
>
> Cheers,
> Ralph