Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Bill Lavender <[email protected]> · Wed, 19 May 2010 11:56:44 -0500

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 10:18:20AM -0500, J. Lewis Muir wrote:
> On 5/18/10 2:24 PM, Davidsaver, Michael wrote:
> > ps. For the future, does anyone has any better ideas for a name then
> > 'epicsdeb##'?
> 
> Hi, Michael.
> 
> What does the 10 in epicsdeb10 mean?  Is that a major version number (1)
> followed by a minor (0)?
> 
> You're basically creating a package that includes (or depends on) a
> bunch of other packages.  I would name it just epics (renaming an
> existing epics package containing EPICS Base to epics-base).  If you
> don't like that, perhaps you could name it epics-suite (?).

One of my bosses (Carlo Segre), who is an official Debian developer,
had one of my coworkers (Ken McIvor) develop some Debian packages of
EPICS base for our own use.  He picked a naming scheme like this

ii  epics                                        3.14.10-1~lenny0                  the Experimental Physics and Industrial Contro
ii  epics                                        3.14.10-1~lenny0                  the Experimental Physics and Industrial Contro
ii  epics-source3.14                             3.14.10-1~lenny0                  Sources for EPICS
ii  libepics3.14                                 3.14.10-1~lenny0                  shared libraries used by EPICS clients
ii  libepics3.14-dbg                             3.14.10-1~lenny0                  debugging symbols for the shared libraries use
ii  libepics3.14-dev                             3.14.10-1~lenny0                  development files for the EPICS libraries
ii  medm                                         3.1.3-1~lenny0                    the Motif Editor and Display Manager (MEDM)

with the version numbers of the packages indicating which version of
EPICS they were for rather than using the name of the package for that.
That is the normal Debian way of handling such things.

Carlo has said that he would strongly prefer to be a sponsor for
Michael Davidsaver's packages in the Debian repositories, rather than
continue to maintain his own versions.  However, for EPICS packages
to be accepted into the Debian repositories, they must obey Debian
standards.  In the EPICS case, this mostly affects the naming of files.
Thus, in Carlo and Ken's packages for EPICS base, you end up with
filenames like this:

    /usr/bin/caget
    /usr/bin/caput
    /usr/sbin/caRepeater
    /usr/include/epics/cadef.h
    /usr/include/epics/errlog.h
    /usr/include/epics/tsDefs.h
    /usr/lib/libCom.so
    /usr/lib/libca.so

If you try to get packages accepted into Debian, you will find that the
Debian community will not _care_ that EPICS has decades worth of history
in using a different filesystem layout.  They can be quite intransigent
about such things.

If you want to see what a Debianized filesystem layout would look like,
take a look at Carlo's repository here:

    http://debian-xray.iit.edu

Once again, this only includes EPICS base and MEDM.  I have _no_ idea
what they would do to things like IocCore and SynApps.

Bill Lavender

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System