Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System
I understand Steve's concern about the hassle and potential for error of manually editing a dozen or more config/RELEASE or configure/RELEASE files each time you upgrade to a new version of an application on which other applications depend. I also understand Ralph's concern about environment variables.
Ron Sluiter at the APS came up with a simple scheme that is a compromise between ease of use and safety. He has a perl script that will update all of your config/RELEASE files for you based on 2 inputs: a list of all the applications that you want to update config/RELEASE files for, and a list of the locations of each application that you want to specify in those config/RELEASE files. It simply searches for all strings in config/RELEASE of the form
EPICS_BASE=[old path]
MPF=[old path]
etc.
and sees if it knows about the items on the left hand side. If so, it updates the values of [old path] on the right hand side to the current path for each item.
This is very convenient. If I get a new release of MPF I just have to edit "master" file telling Ron's utility where the new version is located, then go to Ron's utility application and type:
make release
It updates all applications that depend on MPF.
Why is this better than using environment variables, you ask? Because the config/RELEASE files should be under source/release control. Thus, just before installing the new version of MPF you should tag the current version of each application that depends on MPF, which you would normally want to do anyway. That way if things don't work you can easily back out by knowing what config/RELEASE contained when things were stable.
I would argue that the manual edits mechanism can also lead to the unstable behavior that Ralph described. The problem is that I install a new version of MPF and forget to edit one of the config/RELEASE files. Everything compiles and seems to work, but there is one small thing that has changed and some IOC will die on a holiday weekend. :-)
Mark
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