Tango C++ library 9.3.4

See Changelog.md for the changes.

9.3.4-rc7

Merge pull request #751 from tango-controls/spelling-fix

log4tango/src/StringUtil.hh: Fix spelling contructed -> constructed

test-auto-deploy-v2

changes

9.3.4-rc6

Merge pull request #702 from mliszcz/backport-fix-496-blind-event-cli…

9.3.4-rc5

Merge pull request #707 from tango-controls/bourtemb-Update-9.3.4-Cha…

9.3.4-rc4

Update changelog for 9.3.4 (#672)

9.3.4-rc2

Merge pull request #621 from t-b/fix-spelling-errors

Fix spelling errors

9.3.4-rc1

Merge pull request #597 from tango-controls/add-debian-buster

Add debian buster (for 9.3-backports branch)

Tango C++ library 9.3.3

March 29, 2019

Linux:
Windows: available in the Assets section below these Release Notes

What's new (since version 9.2.5)?

• cppTango source code repository has been moved from subversion on Sourceforge.net to git on GitHub.com. The tango-cs subversion repository on SourceForge has been frozen at a temperature near 0 K. The SourceForge tickets have been converted to GitHub issues so we keep track of all the old problems which have been solved... as well as all the old problems which are still there and that we should fix at some point.
• cppTango now uses CMake (version 2.8.12 or more recent) as build system because we think it's cool and much easier to use than the autotools... And we can even use it on Windows! Please refer to INSTALL.md file to get more details if you want to build and install from the source code.
• Integration tests are now public and built automatically using Travis CI for Linux.
• cppTango is now using appveyor to automatically build the Tango C++ library on Windows, as well as Windows installers for the Tango C++ library for different Windows compilers (from MSVC9 to MSVC15, 32 bits and 64 bits). Anyone who already tried to compile the Tango C++ library on Windows can understand how this is great news!
• A map was added in MultiAttribute object to improve performances when searching for an attribute by name.
  We should have thought about it before, it is much faster to find something with a good map! This should greatly improve the performances in the case where a device has a large number of attributes and should produce less heat on your CPU. A small contribution to reduce the impact on the climate.
• An error message is now printed with the exception description if the event callback provided by the user
  (push_event() method) is throwing an exception. Yes, the user code can sometimes throw an exception!
• Support for NaN and Inf was added in float and double properties.
  So now you can use the keywords NaN, -NaN, inf, -inf and +inf when writing double and float scalar and array properties from jive.
  It is not case sensitive, so nan, -NAN , nAn, iNF, -Inf and +INF are also supported for instance.
  A negative NaN is extracted as NaN.
• DevVarBooleanArray DeviceData insertion and extraction operators have been added.
• It is now possible to create dynamic forwarded attributes. This works well when the device server exports only one device per class. Please refer to [#342][pr-342] for more details about the limitations.
• Development Debian packages for the Tango C++ library are now deployed automatically on Bintray when a git tag is created so you can play with it easily after the creation of a new git tag. But be careful here. This Debian package provides only libtango library and is currently not compatible with the official libtango package provided by Debian.
• Codacy and Sonar tools have been integrated.
  So it is now possible to monitor the tests coverage and to benefit from static analysis and automatic code reviews from these tools to detect potential issues. You can click on the GitHub badges in cppTango README.md file to get more details. Of course, we will use these results as a good basis to improve the tests coverage and fix the issues reported by these tools, in the next releases.
• cppTango can now be compiled with Clang and recent g++ versions
• A search bar has been added to Doxygen generated documentation, which is now generated and saved in
  cppTango-docs repository. The Doxygen documentation is now available directly at this URL: https://tango-controls.github.io/cppTango-docs or indirectly on the official Tango documentation.
• The device server reliability has been improved when removing dynamic attributes from delete_device() method.
• It is now possible to insert a const C string in a DeviceData

Tango::DeviceData din;
din << "My Wonderful C string";

• We improved the integration tests by splitting one of our big monolithic tests into several executables, by adding new tests and by making them more reliable. Still we are far from 100% coverage.
• As python 2.x is reaching EOL soon (PEP 373) and some distributions already switched to use python 3.x as a default python interpreter, we follow PEP 394 and use python2 command/link instead of python when invoking cxxtestgen. If python2 is missing, CMake will fall-back to using python (if it's on $PATH).

Changes which might have an impact on users

• log4tango is no longer a separate library. It is now part of libtango library.
  This means that it is no longer required to link Tango C++ programs with liblog4tango.
  This also means that programs compiled with a previous Tango 9 release of the Tango C++ library will still require
  log4tango library at execution time until they are recompiled with the newer cppTango version and until their Makefile is updated to no longer link with log4tango library.
• zmq.hpp file has been removed. This adds a dependency to cppzmq.
• tango.h file is now generated during the build process from the tango.idl file.
  This adds a dependency to tango-idl repository.
  omniidl is also required to be able to generate tango.h file.
• The include files are now installed under <install_prefix>/include/tango instead of <install_prefix>/include.
  You may have to update your Makefiles in order to match this new include install location.
• log4tango include files are now installed under <install_prefix>/include/tango/log4tango.
  You may have to update your Makefiles in order to match this new include install location.
• DeviceAttribute::get_type() no longer throws an API_EmptyDeviceAttribute exception when the DeviceAttribute is empty. It returns DATA_TYPE_UNKNOWN instead.
  Warning! This change could lead to Segmentation fault in code doing something like:

    DeviceAttribute da;
    da = device->read_attribute("AnAttributeWithINVALIDQualityFactor");
    cout << "Type = " << Tango::CmdArgTypeName[da.get_type()] << endl;

Please refer to [#510][i-510] for more details.

• 2 consecutive change events having possibly the same attribute value (but different timestamps) might be sent now during the Device Server startup phase.
  This was necessary to fix a bug where a client would possibly miss some important change events after a device server restart. Please refer to #359 and #503 to get more details.
• We reduced the sleep time during the event subscription phase.
  This should speed up the startup of some GUI applications which are subscribing to events for a huge number of attributes. Sadly, in some hopefully rare situations (slow network, busy computers), this could lead to a situation where some events might be missed if they occur between the subscribe_event() call and the ZMQ subscription reception (which is asynchronous) on the ZMQ publisher side, potentially leading to situations where a client application might show out of date/incorrect values until the next event is received. It was already the case in the previous versions but reducing the sleep time during the event subscription will increase the probability of this situation to happen. We are working on this topic to try to solve this edge case issue. We are sorry for the inconvenience. In any case, we hope this change will provide more comfort than problems.
• Tango::string_free() method has been added.
  The users are strongly encouraged to use this method together with Tango::string_dup() when dealing with
  Tango::DevString variables instead of using CORBA::string_free() and CORBA::string_dup().
• We added -pedantic flag when compiling with g++ or Clang in debug mode.
  This change can generate build errors with very old compilers (e.g. g++ 3.4.6) when compiling the library debug version. Please remove manually -pedantic flag in configure/CMakeLists.txt if you need to compile the debug version on a very old compiler.
• Tests no longer compile on old compilers (at least gcc <= 4.4.5). Please refer to #487 for more details.

Bug fixes

Event related bug fixes

• We think we found a way to get rid of heartbeat events problems!
  You know, when you were subscribing to events and receiving an API_EventTimeout error event every 10 seconds, followed by a valid event (which was corresponding to the synchronous read_attribute call occurring during the event reconnection mechanism)? This problem was occurring because the client and the server were computing different heartbeat event channel names in some situations (for instance when the TANGO_HOST was not exactly the same string on the client side and server side or when the DNS was not well configured. At least not configured as Tango would have expected it). So the client was subscribing to heartbeat events with a name and the device server was sending heartbeat events with another channel name. Since the key for a good relationship in a ...

9.3.2

Binaries

Linux:
Windows:

Release notes

1. Add Tango::string_free and fix memory leak in zmq_event_subscription_change() (#457, #460)
2. Fix bug impacting device servers using dynamic attributes (#458, #459)
3. Fix reconnection issues when a client subscribes to several events (#455, #483))
4. Fix some event compatibility issues with device server <= Tango 8 (#456)
5. Fix event field in EventData structure passed to user's callback (broken in Tango 9.3.0 and 9.3.1)
6. Fix attribute name in EventData structure passed to user's callback for Attribute Config events
7. Fix a bug occurring when an event is pushed at the same time as an event (re)subscription occurs (#484, #485)
8. Fix event name (EventData.event) passed to client's Callback after Tango 9 attribute reconnection (#486)
9. Integrate Coveralls (#473) and Sonar (#478)
10. Tests: Split runner executable into several executables (#275). Disable log4tango bench test.
11. Doxygen: upgrade to doxygen 1.8.13. Fix some doxygen warnings. (#475)