Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> · Thu, 15 Feb 2018 17:42:47 -0600

On 02/15/2018 05:04 PM, Konrad, Martin wrote:
> If our rules files become more complex in the future we might need to
> consider generating them using some tool that comes with a decent
> template engine. Since we are already using Puppet for managing our
> configuration files/IOCs this might be the way to go for the future.
> Using an appropriate Hiera data backend, Puppet could pull data from any
> data source (e.g. YAML files, SQL, LDAP,...). Maybe you have a similar
> configuration-management tool you can leverage?

For simple setups it is possible to use the GNU C pre-processor to
generate ACF files.

There are rules in the EPICS build system (in configure/RULES.Db) to
pass a .acs file through cpp to generate a .acf file. The .acs input
file can #include other files which use #define to create macros that
define common lists of users and machine names or even rules, then the
.acf files use these macros as needed by the IOC/subsystem.

The preprocessor does add "# <line> <file>" lines to the output files,
but asLib just ignores them as comments. You do have to use // and
/*...*/ comments in your .acs files instead of #<comment> though.

It ought to be possible to use msi too, but I haven't tried that.

- Andrew

-- 
Arguing for surveillance because you have nothing to hide is no
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Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System