Bug#1004732: epics-base: Need to changes epics-base binary packages to broaden the support

[Neil Williams]

Source: epics-base
Version: 7.0.3.1-3
Severity: important
X-Debbugs-Cc: codehelp at debian.org

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) in Debian
relates to the epics-base source package and the pyepics work that will
result in new packages in Debian in due course.

Currently, epics-base source only builds libca.so and libCom.so (with
relevant -dev binary packages). EPICS is intended for distributed
control systems and has a variety of extra components. It is not clear
how best to subdivide some of those components but compatibility with
the current Anaconda support on Linux may be necessary and this includes
packaging a lot more of the objects built from the epics-base source.

I initially wanted to add enough support as binary packages built from
the epics-base source to be able to support the pyepics upstream unit
tests:
https://pyepics.github.io/pyepics/installation.html#prerequisites

However, these require a three-part harness that might be feasible in
Salsa but is not possible in a build test in Debian. Instead, I'm
looking at how EPICS itself is used on Linux outside Debian.

epics-base includes template pkg-config support, so this should be
included. This expresses a difference between "HOST" libraries and "IOC"
libraries which would add the dbRecStd dbCore shared libraries to the
supported list for Debian.

epics-base in Debian does not currently include the EPICS header files,
nor the DBD support files. In particular, there is a caRepeater
executable and systemd service file which need to be added, possibly an
ioLogServer service too.

Overall, the epics-base source package in Debian looks like it needs
changes to include more components, including executables, data files,
documentation files and possibly perl bindings as well.

I'm going to work on these changes in Salsa and see how to provide the
relevant support in Debian as part of the work to package pyepics.

This is a tracking bug, filed with agreement from Andrius Merkys, to
describe the issues and let others know what changes are being
investigated.

It is not clear, at this point, whether the executables will be
installed in a /usr/lib/<arch>/epics/libexec/ location or in /usr/bin/ -
that will depend on the investigation to be done for this bug. (e.g.
some of the executables may need patching to change the current embedded
path to the DBD files.)

The changes are likely to involve changing the names of the current
binary packages built from src:epics-base and, therefore, a trip through
NEW, so it would be best not to build using the current binary packages
as build-dependencies.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: bookworm/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 5.15.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/16 CPU threads)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled