Latest C/C++ compilers (MacOS 10.10, GCC on RHEL7 and Ubuntu) generate a large number of new 
warnings about unused variables, unused functions, dead code, failure to check return values of system 
calls, etc.

Some of these warnings catch real bugs so we do not want to turn them off.

Most of these warnings have been cleaned out in the latest MIDAS code. On MacOS and RHEL6 Linux MIDA 
S compiles without any warnings. On RHEL7 and Ubuntu Linux there are some warnings from a few 
problematic files, history.c being the worst (it will be eventually cleaned out).

K.O.

I commited the mhttpd fixes and improvements to the history code accumulated while running the ALPHA 
experiment at CERN:

- fix crashes and infinite loops while generating history plots (also seen in TWIST)
- permit more than 10 variables per history plot
- let users set their own colours for variables on history plot
- (finally) add gui elements for setting mimimum and maximum values on a plot
- implement special "history" mode. In this mode, the master mhttpd does all the work, except for 
generating of history plots, which is done in a separate mhttpd running in history mode, possibly on a 
different computer (via ODB variable "/history/url").

I also have improvements to the mhttpd elog code (better formatting of email) and to the "export history 
plot as CSV" function, which I will not be commiting: for elog, we switched to the standalone elogd; and 
CSV export is still very broken, even with my fixes.

The commited fixes have been in use at CERN since last Summer, but I could have introduced errors 
during the merge & commit. I am now using this new code, so any new errors should surface and get 
squashed quickly.

K.O.

I commited the latest driver for the Wiener CCUSB USB-CAMAC driver. It
implements all functions from mcstd.h and has been tested to be plug-compatible
with at least one of our CAMAC frontends. K.O.

> I commited the latest driver for the Wiener CCUSB USB-CAMAC driver. It
> implements all functions from mcstd.h and has been tested to be plug-compatible
> with at least one of our CAMAC frontends. K.O.

This driver is known to not work with the latest CCUSB firmware (20x, 204, 30x, 303). I know what 
modifications are required and an updated driver will be available shortly. If there is a delay, and you need the 
driver ASAP, please drop me an email.

Also, I am thinking about dropping support for the very old CCUSB firmware revisions (before 204). (Any 
comments?)

K.O.

> > I commited the latest driver for the Wiener CCUSB USB-CAMAC driver. It
> > implements all functions from mcstd.h and has been tested to be plug-compatible
> > with at least one of our CAMAC frontends. K.O.

Well, it took almost a year to finish an updated driver, which has now been
commited to MIDAS SVN (see http://savannah.psi.ch/viewcvs/trunk/drivers/camac/ccusb/?root=midas).

This supports ccusb firmware release 0x402. With earlier firmware, simple CAMAC operations should work,
but to use the readout list feature one has to have the latest main firmware (0x402 as of today) and the latest CPLD
firmware.

The driver kit includes:
- the "ccusb" driver which implements the MIDAS mcstd.h CAMAC interface;
- test_ccusb to probe the interface and generally make the lights flash;
- ccusb_flash for updating the ccusb main firmware (assembled from bits and pieces found on the CCUSB driver CD);
- feccusb, an example midas frontend, which uses the ccusb readout list feature and has extensive error handling,
should be good enough for production use (unlike the Wiener libxxusb drivers, which lack basic error handling).
- analyzer.cxx, an rootana-based example on how to decode the ccusb data;
- README file with release notes.

If you use this driver, please drop me an email (even if it works perfectly for you, hah!) - the ccusb device is very
nice but can be hard to use and I would like to hear about problems other people have with it.

Today's version of the README files is attached below:

MIDAS driver for the Wiener/JTec CC-USB CAMAC-USB interface.

Date: 22-AUG-2007/KO

Note 1: The CC-USB interface comes with a CD which contains manuals,
firmware files, Windows and Linux software. The Wiener/JTec driver
is called "libxxusb". These MIDAS/musbstd drivers were written before
libxxusb bacame available and do not use libxxusb.

This driver implements the MIDAS CAMAC interafce "mcstd.h" using
the MIDAS USB interface musbstd.h.

Note 2: There exist many revisions of CCUSB firmware. Basic CAMAC
access works in all of them, but the "readout list" feature seems
to be only functional with firmware revision 0x402 or older and
with CPLD revisions CC_atmmgr_101406.jed, CC_datamgr_021905.jed,
CC_lammgr_brdcst_041906.jed or older.

To upgrade the main CCUSB firmware, follow instructions from
the CCUSB manual. On Linux, one can use the ccusb_flash
program included with these MIDAS drivers. It is a copy
of ccusb_flash from the Wiener CD, with all the pieces
assembled into one place and with a working Makefile. (I am too
lazy to add the flashing bits to the ccusb.c driver).

To upgrade the CPLD firmware, one needs a Xilinx JTag programmer
cable (we use a "parallel port to JTag" cable provided by Wiener),
and the Xilinx software (on Linux, we use Xilinx91i). For successful
upgrade, follow instructions from Xilinx and Wiener.

Note 3: Before starting to use the CCUSB interface, one should obtain
the latest version of the CCUSB manual and firmware by downloading
the latest version the CCUSB driver CD from the Wiener web
site (registration required)

Note 4: The example CCUSB frontend assumes this hardware configuration:
LeCroy 2249A 12 channel ADC in slot 20, Kinetic Systems 3615 6 channel
scaler in slot 12. NIM trigger input connected to CCUSB input "I1"
firing at 10-100 Hz. Without the external trigger CCUSB will not
generate any data and the frontend will only give "data timeout"
errors. With the trigger, the LED on the scaler should flash at 1 Hz
and the LEDs on the CCUSB should flash at the trigger rate.

Note 5: The CCUSB interface does not reliably power up in some CAMAC
crates (this has something to do with the sequence in which
different voltages start at different times with different CAMAC
power supplies). Some newer CCUSB modules may have this
problem fixed in the hardware and in the CPLD firmware. For modules
exhibiting this problem (i.e. no USB communication after power up),
try to cycle the power several time, or implement the "hardware reset
switch" (ask Wiener).

Note 6: The CCUSB firmware is very fickle and would crash if you look
at it the wrong way. This MIDAS driver tries to avoid all known crashers
and together with the example frontend, can recover from some
of them. Other crashes cannot be recovered from other than by
a hardware reset or power cycle.

//end

Dear all, 

this posting results from the Fermilab move to a new packaging/build system called spack 
which doesn't allow to use the MIDAS install procedure described at

https://daq00.triumf.ca/MidasWiki/index.php/Quickstart_Linux#MIDAS_Package_Installation

as is. Spack specifics aside, building MIDAS under spack took  
a) adding cmake install for three directories: drivers, resources, and python/midas, 
b) adding one more include file - include/tinyexpr.h - to the list of includes installed by cmake.

With those changes I was able to point MIDASSYS to the spack install area and successfully run mhttpd, 
build experiment-specific C++ frontends and drivers, use experiment-specific python frontends etc. 
I'm not using anything from MIDAS submodules though.

I'm wondering what the experts would think about accepting the changes above to the main tree. 

Installation procedures and changed to cmake files are always a sensitive area with a lot of boundary 
constraints coming from the existing use patterns, and even a minor change could have unexpected consequences
So I wouldn't be surprised if the fairly minor changes outlined above had side effects.

The patch file is attached for consideration.

-- regards, Pasha

I don't see any bad side effects at the moment, so I accepted the changes and committed them.

Stefan

Hi,

if I check out midas and try to configure it with 

cmake ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/midas

I do get the error messages:

  Target "midas" INTERFACE_INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES property contains path:

    "<path>/tmidas/midas/include"

  which is prefixed in the source directory.

Is the cmake setup not relocatable? This is new and was working until recently:

MIDAS version:      2.1
GIT revision:       Thu May 27 12:56:06 2021 +0000 - midas-2020-08-a-295-gfd314ca8-dirty on branch HEAD
ODB version:        3

> cmake ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/midas

good timing, I am working on cmake for manalyzer and rootana and I have not tested
the install prefix business.

now I know to test it for all 3 packages.

I will also change find_package(Midas) slightly, (see my other message here),
I hope you can confirm that I do not break it for you.

K.O.

> cmake ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/midas
> Is the cmake setup not relocatable? This is new and was working until recently:

Indeed. Not relocatable. This is because we do not install the header files.

When you use the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX, you get MIDAS "installed" in:

prefix/lib
prefix/bin
$MIDASSYS/include <-- this is the source tree and so not "relocatable"!

Before, this was kludged and cmake did not complain about it.

Now I changed cmake to handle the include path "the cmake way", and now it knows to complain about it.

I am not sure how to fix this: we have a conflict between:

- our normal way of using midas (include $MIDASSYS/include, link $MIDASSYS/lib, run $MIDASSYS/bin)
- the cmake way (packages *must be installed* or else! but I do like install(EXPORT)!)
- and your way (midas include files are in $MIDASSYS/include, everything else is in your special location)

I think your case is strange. I am curious why you want midas libraries to be in prefix/lib instead of in 
$MIDASSYS/lib (in the source tree), but are happy with header files remaining in the source tree.

K.O.

> > cmake ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/midas
> > Is the cmake setup not relocatable? This is new and was working until recently:
> 
> Indeed. Not relocatable. This is because we do not install the header files.
> 
> When you use the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX, you get MIDAS "installed" in:
> 
> prefix/lib
> prefix/bin
> $MIDASSYS/include <-- this is the source tree and so not "relocatable"!
> 
> Before, this was kludged and cmake did not complain about it.
> 
> Now I changed cmake to handle the include path "the cmake way", and now it knows to complain about it.
> 
> I am not sure how to fix this: we have a conflict between:
> 
> - our normal way of using midas (include $MIDASSYS/include, link $MIDASSYS/lib, run $MIDASSYS/bin)
> - the cmake way (packages *must be installed* or else! but I do like install(EXPORT)!)
> - and your way (midas include files are in $MIDASSYS/include, everything else is in your special location)
> 
> I think your case is strange. I am curious why you want midas libraries to be in prefix/lib instead of in 
> $MIDASSYS/lib (in the source tree), but are happy with header files remaining in the source tree.
> 
> K.O.

We do it this way, since the lib and bin needs to be in a place where standard users have no access to. 
If I think an all other packages I am working with, e.g. ROOT, the includes are also installed under CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX. 
Up until recently there was no issue to work with CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX, accepting that the includes stay under 
$MIDASSYS/include, even though this is not quite the standard way, but no problem here. Anyway, since CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX 
is a standard option from cmake, I think things should not "break" if you want to use it.

A.S.

> > > cmake ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/midas
> > > Is the cmake setup not relocatable? This is new and was working until recently:
> > Not relocatable. This is because we do not install the header files.
> 
> We do it this way, since the lib and bin needs to be in a place where standard users have no access to. 

hmm... i did not get this. "needs to be in a place where standard users have no access to". what do you
mean by this? you install midas in a secret location to prevent somebody from linking to it?

> If I think an all other packages I am working with, e.g. ROOT, the includes are also installed under CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX.

cmake and other frameworks tend to be like procrustean beds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes),
pre-cmake packages never quite fit perfectly, and either the legs or the heads get cut off. post-cmake packages
are constructed to fit the bed, whether it makes sense or not.

given how this situation is known since antiquity, I doubt we will solve it today here.

(I exercise my freedom of speech rights to state that I object being put into
such situations. And I would like to have it clear that I hate cmake (ask me why)).

>
> Up until recently there was no issue to work with CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX, accepting that the includes stay under 
> $MIDASSYS/include, even though this is not quite the standard way, but no problem here.
>

I think a solution would be to add install rules for include files. There will be a bit of trouble,
normal include path is $MIDASSYS/include,$MIDASSYS/mxml,$MIDASSYS/mjson,etc, after installing
it will be $CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX/include (all header files from different git submodules all
dumped into one directory). I do not know what problems will show up from that.

I think if midas is used as a subproject of a bigger project, this is pretty much required
(and I have seen big experiments, like STAR and ND280, do this type of stuff with CMT,
another horror and the historical precursor of cmake)

The problem is that we do not have any super-project like this here, so I cannot ever
be sure that I have done everything correctly. cmake itself can be helpful, like
in the current situation where it told us about a problem. but I will never trust
cmake completely, I see cmake do crazy and unreasonable things way too often.

One solution would be for you or somebody else to contribute such a cmake super-project,
that would build midas as a subproject, install it with a CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX and
try to link some trivial frontend or analyzer to check that everything is installed
correctly. It would become an example for "how to use midas as a subproject").
Ideally, it should be usable in a bitbucket automatic build (assuming bitbucket
has correct versions of cmake, which it does not half the time).

P.S. I already spent half-a-week tinkering with cmake rules, only to discover
that I broke a kludge that allows you to do something strange (if I have it right,
the CMAKE_PREFIX_INSTALL code is your contribution). This does not encourage
 me to tinker with cmake even more. who knows against what other
kludge I bump into. (oh, yes, I know, I already bumped into the nonsense
find_package(Midas) implementation).

K.O.

> > > > cmake ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/midas
> > > > Is the cmake setup not relocatable? This is new and was working until recently:
> > > Not relocatable. This is because we do not install the header files.
> > 
> > We do it this way, since the lib and bin needs to be in a place where standard users have no access to. 
> 
> hmm... i did not get this. "needs to be in a place where standard users have no access to". what do you
> mean by this? you install midas in a secret location to prevent somebody from linking to it?
> 

This was a wrong wording from my side. We do not want the the users have write access to the midas installation libs and bins.
I have submitted the pull request which should resolve this without interfere with your usage.
Hope this will resolve the issue.

> > > > > cmake ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/midas
> > > > > Is the cmake setup not relocatable? This is new and was working until recently:
> > > > Not relocatable. This is because we do not install the header files.
> > > 
> > > We do it this way, since the lib and bin needs to be in a place where standard users have no access to. 
> > 
> > hmm... i did not get this. "needs to be in a place where standard users have no access to". what do you
> > mean by this? you install midas in a secret location to prevent somebody from linking to it?
> > 
> 
> This was a wrong wording from my side. We do not want the the users have write access to the midas installation libs and bins.
> I have submitted the pull request which should resolve this without interfere with your usage.
> Hope this will resolve the issue.

Excellent. I think it is good to have midas "install" in a sane manner.

But I still struggle to understand what you do. Presumably you can "install" midas
in the "midas account", which is not writable by the experiment and user accounts.
Then it does not matter if you "install" it in it's build directory (like we do)
or in some other location (like you do now).

This does not work of course if you only have one account, so do you build midas
as root? or install it as root?

I do ask because in the current computing world, doing things as root requires
a certain amount of trust, which may not be there anymore, see the recent "supply side" attacks
against python packages, solar winds hack, linux kernel malicious patches from umn, etc.

Personally, I do not want to answer questions "is midas safe to run as root?",
"can I trust the midas install scripts to run as root?" and certainly I do not want to hear
about "I installed midas and 100 other packages as root and got hacked 7 days later".

(and running midas as root was never safe. neither mhttpd nor mserver will pass
a security audit).

Anyhow, looks like I will look at cmake again next week. Right now I have a major
breakthrough in the ALPHA-g experiment, my big 96-port Juniper switch suddenly
has working ethernet flow control and I can record data at 600 Mbytes/sec without
any UDP packet loss. Above that, my event builder explodes. I want to fix it and get
it up to 1000 Mbytes/sec, the limit of my 10gige network link. (In this system I do not
have the disk subsystem to record data at this rate, but I have build 8-disk ZFS arrays
that would sink it, no problem). And the day has come when I ran out of CPU cores.
The UDP packet receivers are multithreaded, the event builder is multithreaded and I am using
all 4 of the available cores (intel cpu). As soon as I can get a rackmounted AMD Ryzen
or Threadripper machine, we will likely upgrade. (need at least one more CPU core to run
the online analyzer!). Exciting.

K.O.

> > > > > > cmake ../ -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local/midas
> > > > > > Is the cmake setup not relocatable? This is new and was working until recently:
> > > > > Not relocatable. This is because we do not install the header files.
> > > > 
> > > > We do it this way, since the lib and bin needs to be in a place where standard users have no access to. 
> > > 
> > > hmm... i did not get this. "needs to be in a place where standard users have no access to". what do you
> > > mean by this? you install midas in a secret location to prevent somebody from linking to it?
> > > 
> > 
> > This was a wrong wording from my side. We do not want the the users have write access to the midas installation libs and bins.
> > I have submitted the pull request which should resolve this without interfere with your usage.
> > Hope this will resolve the issue.
> 
> Excellent. I think it is good to have midas "install" in a sane manner.
> 
> But I still struggle to understand what you do. Presumably you can "install" midas
> in the "midas account", which is not writable by the experiment and user accounts.
> Then it does not matter if you "install" it in it's build directory (like we do)
> or in some other location (like you do now).
> 
> This does not work of course if you only have one account, so do you build midas
> as root? or install it as root?
> 

We work the following way: there is a production Midas under let's say /usr/local/midas (make install as sudo/root). This is for the running experiment. Since we are doing muSR, we 
have experiments on a daily base, rather than month and years as it is the case for a particle physics experiment. Now, still we would like to test updates, new features of Midas on 
the same machine. For this we us the repo directly. If we are happy with the new feature, and fixes, we again do a 'make install' and hence freeze for the production a specific 
snapshot. Of course we could use various local copies of the Midas repo, but over the last years this approach was very convenient and productive. Hope this explains a bit better 
why we want to work with a CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX.

AS

big thanks to Andreas S. for getting most of this figured out. I now understand
much better how cmake installs things and how it generates config files, both
find_package(midas) style and install(export) style.

with the latest updates, CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX should work correctly. I now understand how it works,
how to use it and how to test it, it should not break again.

for posterity, my commends to Andreas's pull request:

thank you for providing this code, it was very helpful. at the end I implemented things slightly differently. It took me a while to understand that I have to provide 2 “install” modes, for your case, I need to 
“install” the header files and everything works “the cmake way”, for our normal case, we use include files in-place and have to include all the git submodules to the include path. I am quite happy with the 
result. K.O.

K.O.

Dear Konstantin,

I have tried your adopted version. You did already quite a job which is more consistent than what I was suggesting.
Yet, I still have a problem (git sha2 2d3872dfd31) when starting on a clean system (i.e. no midas present yet): 
Without CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX set, everything is fine. 
However, when setting CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX, I get the following error message on the build level (cmake --build ./ -- VERBOSE=1) from the manalyzer:

[ 32%] Building CXX object manalyzer/CMakeFiles/manalyzer.dir/manalyzer.cxx.o
cd /home/l_musr_tst/Tmp/midas/build/manalyzer && /usr/bin/c++  -DHAVE_FTPLIB -DHAVE_MIDAS -DHAVE_ROOT_HTTP -DHAVE_THTTP_SERVER -DHAVE_TMFE -DHAVE_ZLIB -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -I/home/l_musr_tst/Tmp/midas/manalyzer -I/usr/local/root/include  -O2 -g -Wall -Wformat=2 -Wno-format-nonliteral -Wno-strict-aliasing -Wuninitialized -Wno-unused-function -std=c++11 -pipe -fsigned-char -pthread -DHAVE_ROOT -std=gnu++11 -o CMakeFiles/manalyzer.dir/manalyzer.cxx.o -c /home/l_musr_tst/Tmp/midas/manalyzer/manalyzer.cxx
In file included from /home/l_musr_tst/Tmp/midas/manalyzer/manalyzer.cxx:14:0:
/home/l_musr_tst/Tmp/midas/manalyzer/manalyzer.h:13:21: fatal error: midasio.h: No such file or directory
 #include "midasio.h"
                     ^
compilation terminated.

Obviously, still some include paths are missing. I tried quickly to see if an easy fix is possible, but I failed.

Question: is it possible to use manalyzer without midas? I am asking since the MIDAS_FOUND flag is confusing me.

> big thanks to Andreas S. for getting most of this figured out. I now understand
> much better how cmake installs things and how it generates config files, both
> find_package(midas) style and install(export) style.
> 
> with the latest updates, CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX should work correctly. I now understand how it works,
> how to use it and how to test it, it should not break again.
> 
> for posterity, my commends to Andreas's pull request:
> 
> thank you for providing this code, it was very helpful. at the end I implemented things slightly differently. It took me a while to understand that I have to provide 2 “install” modes, for your case, I need to 
> “install” the header files and everything works “the cmake way”, for our normal case, we use include files in-place and have to include all the git submodules to the include path. I am quite happy with the 
> result. K.O.
> 
> K.O.

cmake check and mate in 1 move. please help.

the midas cmake file has a typo in the ROOT_CXX_FLAGS, I fixed it and now I am dead in the 
water, need help from cmake experts and pushers.

On Ubuntu:
ROOT_CXX_FLAGS has -std=c++14
midas cmake defines -std=gnu++11 (never mind that I asked for c++11, not "c++11 with GNU 
extensions")

the two compiler flags collide and the build explodes, the best I can tell c++11 prevails 
and ROOT header files blow up because they expect c++14.

if I remove the midas cmake request for c++11, -std=gnu++11 is gone, there is no conflict 
with ROOT C++14 request and the build works just fine.

but now it explodes on CentOS-7 because by default, c++11 is not enabled. (include <mutex> 
blows up).

what a mess.

K.O.

> cmake check and mate in 1 move. please help.
> -std=c++11 and -std=c++14 collision...

I have a solution implemented for this, I am not happy with it, Stefan is not happy with it. See 
discussion: https://bitbucket.org/tmidas/midas/commits/50a15aa70a4fe3927764605e8964b55a3bb1732b

K.O.

> > cmake check and mate in 1 move. please help.
> > -std=c++11 and -std=c++14 collision...
> 
> I have a solution implemented for this, I am not happy with it, Stefan is not happy with it. See 
> discussion: https://bitbucket.org/tmidas/midas/commits/50a15aa70a4fe3927764605e8964b55a3bb1732b
>

I figured it out, solution is to use:

target_compile_features(midas PUBLIC cxx_std_11)

this is how it works:

- centos-7 (g++ has c++11 off by default): -std=gnu++11 is added automatically (not -std=c++11, but 
probably correct, as some c++11 functions were available as gnu extensions)
- ubuntu-20.04 LTS without ROOT: nothing added (I guess correct, g++ has c++11 is enabled by default)
- ubuntu-20.04 LTS with -std=c++14 from ROOT: nothing added, c++14 as requested by ROOT is in affect.
- macos without ROOT: -std=gnu++11 is added automatically
- macos with -std=c++11 from ROOT: ditto, so both -std=c++11 and -std=gnu++11 are present in this order, 
wrong-ish, but works.

and good luck figuring this out just from cmake documentation:
https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/command/target_compile_features.html

K.O.