On Sun, Oct 24, 2021 at 10:36:06PM +0200, Ben Franksen wrote: > I am looking forward to it. You may want to post a link when it's > done, here or on the EPICS mailing list.
The paper has been published on JSR, and is now available at <https://journals.iucr.org/s/issues/2022/03/00/gy5033/index.html> (arxiv:2204.08434). Half of the paper is spent on (forgive my bluntness) updating certain EPICS-related practices from 1990s to ~2010, which may be quite underwhelming to readers of this mailing list. However, I do find one aspect of the paper potentially useful, and not only so in connection to EPICS: systematic efforts to minimise the complexity in configuring a perhaps large system composed of often specialised hardware and software. Inspired by theories like the Kolmogorov complexity, we can ask: to what limit can we reduce the amount of code and manual operations in building a ready system (X-ray beamline, computer cluster, ...) from commodity hardware, so that the total workload is minimised? I would like to note that the idea was not born from vacuum, as similar ideas can be seen, for instance, from Guix SD's whole-system configuration mechanism. My idea actually originated independently from something like <https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-8369250.html#8369250> (dating back to ~2011), but I guess there must be many other people who have developed similar ideas. BTW, as the review process was too slow, the codebase of our packaging system (see <https://github.com/CasperVector/ihep-pkg-ose> for a fully open-source edition) has evolved quite a little after submission of the original manuscript. One change of perhaps general interest is a small inheritance system for RPM specs, obviously motivated by its Gentoo counterpart; I am mildly confident that the repository in its current state is capable of being a easy-to-use yet maintainable workalike of the NSLS-II repository. Another paper by us and published on JSR is at <https://journals.iucr.org/s/issues/2022/03/00/yn5087/index.html> (arxiv:2203.17236); readers of this list may find it of some interest in implementing GUIs based on AutoCAD-like "command injection", and may find the idea of an EPG immediately familiar after the discussion adove. -- My current OpenPGP key: RSA4096/0x227E8CAAB7AA186C (expires: 2022.09.20) 7077 7781 B859 5166 AE07 0286 227E 8CAA B7AA 186C
