Re: Help needed with E3

[Anders Lindh Olsson via Tech-talk <tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>]

Hi Jörn,

On the specification format and the "e3" package's utilities, they are - indeed - currently hardcoded to interact with our gitlab instance and select groups within that instance. It would, however, probably not be all too difficult to separate out these configurations to a separate file, or to expose optional arguments for overriding them. If you do not have your own gitlab instance, and/or if you want to use both our wrappers and your own, it might be better to allow further customisation through the specifications; for example, by allowing the user to specify the path to the wrapper (instead of doing a name-based lookup). Something like

      adaravis:
        source: some/repo.git
        versions:
          - some/reference

We welcome any contribution as long as it does not break our usage. We would have offered to help, but we are currently focusing on the next generation of e3, using conda, and we are also in the midst of accelerator commissioning.

I am not sure I understand your question about extracting the time information of the git commit that is part of the module version information, but if you are asking about the reference format, these are tags created by the e3-release utility in the same e3 package. We use this utility to mark and schedule deployments to our shared build servers (together with some additional infrastructure).

When it comes to kernel modules, we handle these with ansible nowadays, and I believe they are built into our so-called "ESS Linux" (Yocto) images. Maybe one of my colleagues can offer further support here.


HTH
Anders


On 2025-03-26, 11:51, "Tech-talk on behalf of Jörn Dreyer via Tech-talk" <tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov <mailto:tech-talk-bounces at aps.anl.gov> on behalf of tech-talk at aps.anl.gov <mailto:tech-talk at aps.anl.gov>> wrote:


Hello folks,


after experimenting with SUMO I also tried the E3 framework from ESS and found it very usefull.
It installed without problems on my OpenSuSE Tumbleweed system and compiled the basic modules that I need for my installation without problems.
I also managed to write wrappers for my modules within a few day's but stumbled across some problems for which I do not have a solution yet.


One of my modules needs a small kernel module like the mrfioc2 module. When calling "make dkms_add" it failed because the variable SUDO that
is used in the RULES_DKMS_L file is not defined. Defining this externally made the installation possible but the build with "make dkms_build" failed
because that is not called with the $SUDO prefix. 
As I do not have a CentOS installation available, I can not check how the default configuration is there. So I can not tell if this failure comes from
my specific Linux distribution or it is off more general origin. 


The second topic I would like to get some help with is the specifications files. As the documentation for this file is ESS internal only
I could not find a solution how to extract the correct time information of the git commit that is part of the module version information.


This directly leads to the third problem of how to integrate local modules into the automatic build process of "e3 build".
The default is using gitlab.ess.lu.se only to search for the wrappers. But looking at the source code of e3 it looks as there could be a third parameter
to the module version defining the repository from where to take the module.
Did anybody use E3 outside of ESS with local managed modules and wrappers or knows how to configure it to use a specific repository?


If I manage to get that to work, I would recomend the tool to be used for our upcoming accelerator control system which will be based on EPICs.


Kind regards


Jörn Dreyer
---
Dr. Jörn Dreyer
HIBEF DAQ + Controls
Institut für Strahlenpysik


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