Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System
I am writing to all interested parties as the current maintainer and
main developer of the EPICS sequencer. The problem is:
(1) Seemingly harmless changes to the code organization or in the build
system (i.e. Makefiles) have the tendency to break the build on Windows.
(2) Similarly, running the tests can also easily break on Windows due to
differences in the way processes are started and stopped.
(3) Now and then I forget to avoid gcc'isms (mostly stuff that's not in
the C90 standard) which break when trying to compile with native C
compilers (like Visual Studio).
I have not done any serious work on Windows for years (perhaps decades).
My original hope was that I would get some in-house support, i.e. people
here at HZB who would set up the VMs I need for testing (Windows7 in 32
and 64 bit, both with Mingw and native compiler), but that did not work
out. Which means that, for now and in the forseeable future, I will not
be able to test or even build on Windows, so I cannot rightfully claim
to support it as a build and target platform for the sequencer. For a
while Mark River has acted as de-facto co-maintainer (many thanks for
that!) but his time is understandably limited, given the large number of
projects he is responsible for.
This is why I am asking for a volunteer to act as a co-maintainer of the
sequencer for the Windows side.
Your job would be to
(a) Notify me whenever building or running the tests breaks on Windows.
Ideally this should be automated by extending the Jenkins build farm
(which is currently maintained by Andrew Johnson) to cover the several
Windows variants. But even with that, it doesn't make sense for me to
publish patch after patch waiting hours in between until I find that I
made a stupid error in a Perl script.
(b) Help me to react to reports from users about such problems: try to
reproduce the problem, find out its cause, share your findings (or lack
of them) with me and the user.
(c) Try to come up with a solution. Ideally send me a patch that solves
it. Failing that, collaborate with me via email (or otherwise, perhaps
meet in a chatroom) exchanging analysis and patches until we get it
working again.
You should have Windows machines (VM or real) readily available and
configured to allow building the sequencer and running the testsuite,
ideally in (at least) the four variants I listed above. It would be
perfect if you (or your colleagues) actually used the sequencer on
Windows because some problems only come up in the real world and/or are
hard to test automatically.
It is not necessary to be imtimately familiar with the code base itself,
as I expect most problems to be of the sort described above: build
failures and failures in the test system. I will of course help with
getting started and will answer questions about the code, the build
system, how the tests work etc, whenever they arise.
Being available on short notice is also not a requirement: the work can
usually be postponed a week or two (or longer if necessary) until we
both have enough time available. But at some point there must be the
possibility to tightly work together for as long as it takes to fix
things. (If we are in different time zones this period might stretch
over a few days.) I expect the need for this kind of close collaboration
to arise only occasionally, perhaps every few months, with long
stretches of nothing (noticeable) happening in between.
If nobody volunteers I fear I'll have to remove any claim (in the
documentation) that the sequencer supports Windows as a target or build
platform, acknowlegding what has for a while been the state of things:
if it breaks on Windows you are (more or less) on your own. Of course I
will continue to apply patches people send me when they find a fix for a
problem on Windows, provided it doesn't break anything on Linux.
Cheers
Ben
--
"Make it so they have to reboot after every typo." ― Scott Adams
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