Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Abdalla Ahmad via Tech-talk <[email protected]> · Wed, 8 Jan 2020 07:34:15 +0000

Hello

I had a similar situation when packaging EPICS bases, modules and clients as RPM packages. I ended up with this scheme (in a hope that EPICS naming does not change 😃 ). I assumed 3.14, 3.15 and 7 are separate branches of EPICS base so I plan to make 3 different packages: epics-base-3.14, epics-base-3.15 and epics-base-7 where the package version will be the corresponding minor version number. For example we have epics-base-3.15 RPM working and it has version number 6.0.

Each RPM package of these will conflict with the other two so you don't get binaries and libraries mixed up between different epics versions, and also all of them use the same installation directory structure. I will put each version in a different repo so you get to choose only one version.

I really look forward for the community's feedback on this, especially the idea on separating EPICS versions mentioned earlier.

Thanks!
Abdalla.

-----Original Message-----
From: Tech-talk <[email protected]> On Behalf Of J. Lewis Muir via Tech-talk
Sent: Wednesday, January 08, 2020 1:01 AM
To: EPICS Tech-Talk <[email protected]>
Subject: EPICS release series after 7.0: 7.1 or 8.0?

Hello!

What is the planned EPICS release series after 7.0?  Will it be 7.1 or 8.0?  If it will be 7.1, is the idea that it would be like the 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, 3.14, and 3.15 series where a change in the minor number (in a <major>.<minor>.<patch> versioning scheme) allows breaking backward compatibility?

I'm wishing to plan for how I name EPICS packages that I install, and I want to name them so that they include part of the version in the package name so that I can install them in parallel (i.e., side by side).  This is similar to wanting to install both a Python 2 and 3 package and naming them python2 and python3, respectively, so that they can both be installed at the same time without conflicting with each other.

To do the same for EPICS, I'm wondering whether I need to include the major and minor version, or just the major version in the package name.

For example, I could have packages named epics3, epics7, and epics8, corresponding to 3.15.x, 7.x, and 8.x, but that will only work if the
3.15 series is the last supported series for the 3.x major version, and the 7.x series are expected to not break backward compatibility (i.e., 7.x -> 7.[x+1] does not break backward compatibility).

If the series within the 7.x series (i.e., 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, etc.) will be allowed to break backward compatibility and will likely be supported in parallel, then I will want to put the major and minor version into the package name.  For example, epics315, epics70, epics71, etc.

Thank you!

Lewis

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System