35th Tango Community Meeting: User Feedback & Questions to the gurus

General Other
1

Dear Tangoers,

You are invited to share your experience with Tango in this dedicated topic.
The idea is to gather feedbacks, remarks and comments about Tango your user experience.
Installation, configuration, system administration, daily operation or device development are examples of the topics for which we would appreciate to get some feedback from the community.

In case you’re too shy to speak publicly during the meeting :-), this topic is also the right place to ask your question to the Tango experts.

BTW, there is still room for talks and pitches inthe meeting agenda. Don’t hesitate to submit an abstract on the event website: https://indico.cells.es/e/TangoCommunityMeeting.

Thanks.
N.

2

Hi Nicolas,

thanks for creating this post. Here is the first question.

Currently the Tango version on Ubuntu is 9.2.5 which is getting really old. Debian packaging has recently been updated to 9.3.4.

Q1: When will the Ubuntu Tango packages be updated to more recent ones?
3

Related to Q1: The bug report is Bug #1932290 “Update tango to 9.3.4” : Bugs : tango package : Ubuntu.

4

As a feedback also related to installation/packaging: I find that the experience for newcomers is much much much better now that the whole Tango stack is available in conda-forge (thanks to Benjamin from MAXIV!).

I think that once the tango conda-packages are also built for Windows (currently work-in-progress), it would be a great thing for introducing new people to Tango (e.g., in intro courses, it is a great help when you can provide the same installation instructions regardless of the OS).

5

Hi all,
+1 with Carlos. Installing Tango should be more straightforward.
I recently installed Tango on both Linux and Windows. Having the cpp runtime and development the files ready is quite easy but installing the Java clients (Pogo, Jive, Astor) remains painful.

6

Great news for tango conda packages, that’s a very good news for newcomers!

7

Something from the chat yesterday.
With a growing adoption of PyTANGO from new projects it looks like the set of existing Java clients is less and less adequate to support future users. Also, does this raise a concern about the availability of relevant skills for the continued development and maintenance of the Java applications?

8

Hi,

My comment is about two related topics:

  1. lightweight Tango Database server
  2. -nodb option of running device servers

Regarding 1. Basically a continuation of pytango#414 …

I think having a lightweight database device server e.g. based on a set of YAML (or json) files could be of interest for:

  • automatic testing
  • demo purposes (especially on Windows)
  • small labs/installations
  • easy tracking of changes with file system + VCS e.g. git.

The beacon server (see pytango#414) already started exploiting this. Is there anyone else who is also interested in this that we could meet and exchange opinions with?

Regarding 2. DeviceTestContext is a very nice feature of PyTango. But it looks like to have some limitations, the same limitations as -nodb option - see this doc. Could you confirm this? Are there any plans to overcome them? Especially make the events work?

Many thanks!