Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"J. Lewis Muir" <[email protected]> · Mon, 5 Feb 2018 20:28:03 -0600

On 02/05, Mark Rivers wrote:
> Hi Lewis,
> 
> > Right, and with the way the synApps modules are currently developed,
> > I agree with you.  However, I would bet that the reason synApps does
> > not get updated regularly is that it's a lot of work to do it.  Part
> > of the reason it's a lot of work is all the breaking change.  If
> > all the modules in synApps adhered to semantic versioning and did
> > not introduce breaking changes left and right, making a new synApps
> > release would be significantly easier.
> 
> I really disagree the synApps has lots of breaking changes.  I will
> make the following assertion:
> 
> If you use the latest tagged version of every synApps module
> (including asyn, seq, ipac, areaDetector) it virtually always works.
> That is essentially how I have been running our beamlines for a
> decade.
> 
> In my opinion a new version of synApps should simply be a script:  It
> does a git clone and git checkout of the last tagged version of every
> module as of that date. If that's what it did it could be updated
> frequently.  And users would have a git repository that they could
> trivially update by going into calc, for example, and grab the latest
> bug fix by checking out master, or a specific release by checking out
> R3-7.  It does not make sense to me to be using tar files.
> 
> Can you give me an example where using the latest tagged release of
> each synApps module would have led to problems?

Hi, Mark.

No, unfortunately I can't...at least not without spending a fair amount
of time upgrading everything and trying things out right now.  My
experience has been that there are usually problems such as compile
failures, module DB files renamed, substitution macro names changed
or the values they expect changed, ADL files renamed, IOC function
signatures changed, etc.  I may not have encountered all of those at
once, but I think I usually ran into things like that whenever I would
do an upgrade en masse.  This is up to a few years ago, anyway.  But
since it's been a while since I last did an upgrade, and since your
experience has been so different from mine, I feel less confident about
my experience and about the state of things now; I'm inclined to not
continue trying to make my case.  I defer to your experience on this.

Regards,

Lewis

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System