Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Michael Davidsaver via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov> · Wed, 30 Mar 2022 08:54:54 -0700

On 3/30/22 05:55, Daykin, Evan via Tech-talk wrote:

Hi tech-talk,

I am finishing up a Debian package for base 7.0.6. In the finished product, I discovered that the compiled-in path to softIoc.dbd is not what I expect. I would like the path to be /usr/lib/epics/dbd/softIoc.dbd, but it is instead always pointing to <pwd>/../../dbd/softIoc.dbd, no matter where the softIoc executable resides. This causes an issue, since the Debian package drops the executables in /usr/bin, with symlinks to those executables in /usr/lib/epics. Thus, the calculated DBD path is /usr/bin/../../dbd/softIoc.dbd, which points to nothing.

If I understand correctly, this is happening like so:

1.modules/database/src/std/softIoc/RULES generates epicsInstallDir.h by calling makeInstallDir.pl “$(FINAL_LOCATION)”. (resolves to /usr/lib/epics)

2.softMain.cpp pulls in the EPICS_BASE #define macro from epicsInstallDir.h.

3.softMain.cpp creates a constant DBD_FILE, defined as EPICS_BASE/dbd/softIoc.dbd

4.softMain.cpp’s main method attempts to calculate a relative path based on DBD_FILE, and this is ultimately what is used.

So my question is, what is the preferred course of action here?

-Re-arrange the package to drop executables in $(EPICS_BASE)/bin/$(EPICS_HOST_ARCH), and link to them from /usr/bin?

This seems preferable to me.

-Add a compile-time flag to insist on an absolute path?

-Something else?

* Patch softMain.cpp to use a static, absolute, path for softIoc.dbd.

Thank you,

Evan

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System