we are migrating the dragon experiment from an old mac to a new mac studio and we ran into a problem 
where one equipment format was set to "fixed" instead of "midas". lots of confusion, mdump crash, 
analyzer crash, etc. (mdump fixes for this are already committed).

it made us think whether equipment format is still needed. in the old days we had choice of MIDAS and 
YBOS formats, but YBOS was removed years ago, and I was surprised that format FIXED was permitted at 
all.

I did a midas source code review, this is what I found:

- remnants of YBOS support in a few places, commit to remove them pending.
- FORMAT_ROOT is used in mlogger for automatic conversion of MIDAS banks to ROOT trees
- FORMAT_FIXED is used in a few slow control drivers in drivers/class, instead of creating MIDAS 
banks, they copy raw data directly into an event (there is no bank header and no way to identify such 
events automatically)
- lots of code to support different formats in mdump (mostly dead code)
- the rest of the code does not care or use this format stuff

Current proposal is to remove support for all formats except FORMAT_MIDAS (and FORMAT_ROOT in 
mlogger).

- defines of FORMAT_XXX will be removed from midas.h
- "Format" will be removed from ODB Equipment/Common
- "Format" will be removed from ODB Logger/Channel
- to maintain binary compatibility, we can keep the "Format" ODB entries, but they will be ignored.

List of slow control drivers that support FORMAT_FIXED:

daq00:midas$ grep FORMAT_FIXED drivers/class/*
drivers/class/cd_fdg.cxx:   if (fgd_info->format == FORMAT_FIXED) {
drivers/class/cd_ivc32.cxx:   if (hv_info->format == XFORMAT_FIXED) {
drivers/class/cd_rf.cxx:	if (rf_info->format == XFORMAT_FIXED) 
drivers/class/generic.cxx:   if (gen_info->format == XFORMAT_FIXED) {
drivers/class/hv.cxx:   if (hv_info->format == XFORMAT_FIXED) {
drivers/class/multi.cxx:   if (m_info->format == XFORMAT_FIXED) {
drivers/class/slowdev.cxx:   if (gen_info->format == XFORMAT_FIXED) {
daq00:midas$ 

K.O.