RE: EPICS status codes proposal

[wlupton@keck.hawaii.edu (William Lupton)]

Stephanie,

> Just to make sure I'm not missing something but with the existing system
> or even with your proposed changes, if I make a typo in my error text or 
> if I pick text that is user-unfriendly (which is common thing for some
> programmers), in order to change the text, I have to recompile and 
> reboot the IOC?

Yes, all the schemes proposed so far would require an IOC reboot to change
error text. The only ways that I see to avoid this would be:

1) access all text from a host-resident (maybe NFS-mounted?) file, which 
   might be fine, since error codes are only translated when something goes
   wrong 

2) allow re-download of the relevant .o files (i.e. those containing the status
   code to text mappings) and require the error code
   translation module to do a symbol table lookup to find the translation
   information each time that it tries to translate a code (or have a special
   global or routine which forces it to do so)

In the Unix environment, if one used a shareable library one could switch
error text information just by restarting the relevant process (c.f. VMS).
If one used a file (and knew to re-open it, e.g. by always re-opening it)
then I guess the information could be changed on the fly.

  How much interest is there in being able to change such information on the
fly or at least without re-booting things?

  William