Issues Installing Galil EPICS Drivers – sscan & seq Dependencies Not Building

[Jonathan Hai via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Dear EPICS Tech-Talk Community,

I am trying to install and build the Galil motor drivers for EPICS but have run into several dependency-related issues. Specifically, I cannot successfully build the sscan module (required by Galil) due to a missing scanProg.o, and I am unable to install the seq module (required by sscan) due to a missing lexer.l.

System Information

• Operating System: Ubuntu 24.04
• EPICS Base Version: EPICS 7.0.9
• Compiler: GCC 13.3.0
• Support Modules Installed:
• asyn
• motor
• calc
• autosave
• sscan (fails to build)
• seq (fails to build)

---

Steps Taken & Issues Encountered

1. Installed Required EPICS Modules
• Cloned and built EPICS Base successfully.
• Installed asyn, motor, calc, autosave, and sscan using:

  git clone https://github.com/epics-modules/asyn.git
  git clone https://github.com/epics-modules/motor.git
  git clone https://github.com/epics-modules/calc.git
  git clone https://github.com/epics-modules/autosave.git
  git clone https://github.com/epics-modules/sscan.git
  

• Configured ~/support/sscan/configure/RELEASE with:

  EPICS_BASE=/home/jonathanhai/epics-base
  ASYN=/home/jonathanhai/support/asyn
  MOTOR=/home/jonathanhai/support/motor
  CALC=/home/jonathanhai/support/calc
  AUTOSAVE=/home/jonathanhai/support/autosave
  

• Successfully built asyn, motor, calc, and autosave.

---

2. Failure to Build sscan
• Error during build:

  make[3]: *** No rule to make target 'scanProg.o', needed by 'libscanProgress.a'.  Stop.
  

• Checked for scanProg.o, but no such file exists.
• Looked for scanProg.cpp, but it does not exist either.
• Instead, found scanProg.st, suggesting scanProg.o should be built from scanProg.st using seq.

---

3. Attempted to Install seq, but lexer.c Is Missing
• Cloned seq using:

  git clone https://github.com/epics-modules/seq.git
  

• Build fails with:

  make[3]: *** No rule to make target 'lexer.c', needed by 'lexer.o'.  Stop.
  

• Checked for lexer.l:

  find ~/support/seq -name "lexer.l"
  

  No results, meaning lexer.l is missing.
• Installed flex and bison, then retried building seq:

  sudo apt install flex bison
  cd ~/support/seq
  make clean
  make
  

  Same error persists (lexer.c missing).
• Attempted to manually generate lexer.c, but lexer.l is not present:

  cd ~/support/seq/src/snc
  flex -o lexer.c lexer.l
  

  Error: "flex: can't open lexer.l"

---

Questions

1. Should scanProg.o in sscan be generated from scanProg.st?
• If so, does seq need to be installed first?
• Is there an alternative way to build sscan without scanProg.st?
2. Why is lexer.l missing from seq?
• Has it been removed in recent versions? Should I be using an older release?
• If I manually download lexer.l, will seq build correctly?
3. Are my dependencies set up correctly in configure/RELEASE?
• Should I include additional modules to resolve this?

I'm very new to EPICS, and any help would be greatly appreciated! Thank you for your time.

Best regards,

Jonathan Hai

Researcher/Tech Monkey

CNBL | Department of Physics and Astronomy

McMaster University

Sapere Aude