Re: logging services with shell interaction

["Casper Ti. Vector" <caspervector@gmail.com>]

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.

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