Hi Konstantin,

In the PSI muSR laboratory, we are running about 140 slow control devices across six instruments using Format FIXED.

Could you please wait a bit with removing support for it so that we can assess if/how this will affect us?

Many thanks,
Jonas

> 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.