Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

[email protected] (Janet B. Anderson) · Mon, 19 Jun 1995 14:24:39 -0500

I'd like to make the following changes to epics/base. The changes would have these 
benefits -

BENEFITS
--------

1) Epics base and extensions builds would no longer need $DVL/base/tools
   and $DVL/base/bin/$HOST_ARCH in the developer's path; i.e. epics/base and/or
   epics/extensions developers would no longer have to source a script upon
   entering each of their development nodes.

2) The base/tools directory would only contain tools which are used a) directly
   by epics users, b) by the epics user's tools, and/or c) by builds in multiple
   base directories.  Any build tool that is used by only one base/src directory
   would be put into that directory and executed from there.

CHANGES
-------
1) Remove tools/MakeDirs, tools/Clean, and tools/CheckArch scripts and modify 
   the uninstall rule.

   These scripts are used only by the top level base Makefiles and can be
   added as rules to the Makefiles, and the rules clean, uninstall and dirs
   should be modified to affect only the current BUILD_ARCHS directories. 
   This minor change was what led to all the others and this proposal.

2) Move tools/bldEnvData, tools/blderrSymTbl, and tools/makeStatTbl to the
   src/libCom directory.

   These scripts are only used in building the libCom directory. The libCom
   Makefile should execute them from src/libCom and they DO NOT need to be
   installed.

3) Modify tools/bldEnvData and tools/blderrSymTbl 

   Both tools need $EPICS so make it a param passed from the Makefile
   so they do not need to call FindEpics, and modify blderrSymTbl to take
   new parms $(MAKE) and $(ACC) passed from the Makefile so it does not
   have to call GetVar.

4) Remove tools/gmake 

   All epics developers (base, extensions, and application) will have to call
   gnumake for builds. I think that the options "--no-print-directory" and
   "--no-keep-going" can be the installed defaults for gnumake.

   This is the BIG CHANGE affecting all developers and users  but I think it
   is worth it. Gnumake should be invoked as gnumake. Gmake is not needed!!

5) Modify tools/GetVar and tools/makesdr

   Change gmake to gnumake in both tools. Change $HOST_ARCH in makesdr to  
   be an optional param (to be passed from the makefile) else to come from 
   user's environment.

6) Remove tools/bsdinstall, tools/sgiinstall, and add new installEpics.c to a
   toolsComm subdirectory.

   Remove tools/bsdinstall, tools/sgiinstall, and put Jim Kolwalkowski's old
   addonInstall or the hideos install c program into a toolsComm subdirectory.
   It could be built first and install itself into the base/bin/$HOST_ARCH
   directory to be used from there for all other installs.

After these changes base/tools would contain only the files -

			FindEpics
			GetVar
			InstallVersion
			MakeRelease
			SetOpVersion
			getrel
			makesdr

POSSIBLE FUTURE CHANGES
-----------------------

I also believe that with a bit more work (like putting InstallVersion,
getrel, and makesdr into a base/src subdirectory and installing them 
into base/bin/$HOST_ARCH ) we could get rid of the base/tools directory 
entirely.  It seems that the normal Unix convention is to have both
binary executables and scripts in the bin directory anyway.  I'm not
sure that FindEpics and/or GetVar will be needed by anything other than
getrel after these changes and the changes in progress to do away with
default.dctsdr, so maybe they could be incorporated into getrel. Also, the
SetOpVersion script may be obsolete, no longer be used even at APS. If
base/tools was gone, application developers would need only one epics/base
directory in their path.

Janet

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System