V4 July Meeting Agenda

For now this is just a list of topics I think we need to talk about.

Driver/Device interface – APS Database Services Building structures and arrays – APS Posting fields and changes (with triggers) from the database to data access middleware - APS Super Record – creating new records from functional blocks Andrew, Bob User extensible fields w/ little code – Marty, Kay and Matthias Middleware Interfaces to CA server

    (vampire tap, redundancy?, alarm stream,   cmlog) – Ralph and Benjamin

Network Communication Services Name service (archive data) – Doug and Kay Channel Access Client user interface - Kay and Doug Channel Access Client – Jeff (up to user interface) CAS - Jeff (down to Middleware interfaces) Network Protocol - Jeff Redundancy requirements for field communication – Bob Catalogs and events – Bob Gateway (version bending, storage for data) – Ralph and Benjamin Make system – Benjamin and Janet to look at EPICS office – works with Doug and Kay

These sound like some detial design questions for the above topcs. I was unclear that we have resolved the design and interfaces of the main pieces yet.

• Who is EPICS V4 being written for?
  • Minimum requirements of the OS (should we support Tornado 2.x? No => no 68K)
• epicsTypes, Data Access types, network types, mapping these to platform types.
  • How to introspect arrays without instanciating them?
  • epicsString vs stringSegment, epicsArrayBuffer etc.
• New asynchronous record processing design
  • Splits records up into smaller objects
  • How to link these objects together?
• Replacement for periodic scan threads
• Split libOSI out of libCom?
• What to do about the errlog client & server code
• Flex & Antelope => updated Flex, Bison?
  • We need these for: Access Security, probably for DB file parser, SNC
• Build system - carry on like we have been, or redesign? Options:
  1. Continue with R3.14 build system
  2. Use the modified build system on the CVS main trunk (R3.15)
  3. Adopt GNU autoconf & automake
  4. Parse configuration and Makefiles in Perl, generate specific Makefile
  5. Something else?
• Source code revision management - Subversion repository at APS