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Subject: | Philosophy regarding use of open source libraries for EPICS |
From: | Rod Nussbaumer <[email protected]> |
To: | epics Techtalk <[email protected]> |
Date: | Wed, 16 Nov 2016 07:43:36 -0800 |
All:I would like to get peoples' opinions about the right way to deal with open source third party libraries that get bound to EPICS applications, particularly on Linux, but wherever else it comes into play. An example case would be libgif, which can be used by EDM to display GIF images in EDM screens. The Area Detector package seems to make significant use of such libraries for image processing. So far, the standard procedure here has been to install the libraries from binary repositories supported by OS vendors such as Redhat, Debian, etc. We do this on development hosts and the matching production host architectures. However, this leaves us vulnerable to incompatible changes that may be introduced due to routine maintenance of the hosts, and silently changes the deployed EPICS software with no knowledge of the effect, or testing that it works as expected. The alternative would be to build from sources, all libraries that go into an EPICS application, and install the lib binaries in a way that they get used in lieue of the system-installed packages. Does anyone do that? Am I being paranoid? The obvious question is how far would you take this approach, since literally everything binds to libc, libm, and some other standard libraries.
Thanks in advance for your opinions. Rod Nussbaumer TRIUMF Vancouver, Canada