Re: Doc: Link Field Syntax

[Andrew Johnson <anj@ast.cam.ac.uk>]

On Thu, 18 Jan 1996 09:21:13 -0600 Marty Kraimer <mrk@aps.anl.gov> wrote:
>Formerly the link info was not documented. In the next version of
>App Dev Guide it will be documented. On the EPICS WWW doc there
>is a heading "EPICS Work In Progress around the world". Under there
>is a document "Application Developers Guide Changes (postscript)".
>This is describing the NEXT release of EPICS so most of
>it does not apply to the current release. The description of what is
>allowed in link fields is, however, correct for the existing release.

Marty,

Can I make a suggestion about hardware addressing for a future ascii database 
release, resulting from my having written a number of drivers in recent months?  

I found the standard address types available to be somewhat restricting, so for 
more than one driver I ended up using INST_IO to provides a string which I could 
then parse for myself in the device or driver layer.  What would be really good 
would be a way of allowing the device layer to define what format a hardware 
address should take, rather than providing a fixed number of formats as at 
present.

Obviously existing device support doesn't expect this, so it would probably be 
necessary to provide the current formats to existing drivers somehow without 
having to change them.  I haven't really thought about how you might specify the 
address format, but it is something which I think could be incorporated into the 
(very worthwhile IMHO) work you're doing.

- Andrew

  O o ._    Andrew Johnson, Royal Greenwich Observatory
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