• The evolution of PinK
• Version History

During the HERMES Analysis/Software workshop in the beginning of September in Corvallis/Oregon Klaus Ackerstaff looked into the existing code and started to implement first DAD features. The strong need for a working prototype version to be used for the HERMES slow control system drove further developements. The first working version of the shell was coded along with the first slow control example which controls and monitors the HERMES target section. During that time the main focus was to implement as many features of ADAMO and DAD as needed to get the various applications running. Since DAD was also developed during that time, a daily change of the code was quite normal. Together with Wolfgang Wander especially the DAD interface constantly improved and several applications have been developed in parallel.

Beginning of '95 the search for a name started and on one of the inofficial HERMES "offsite" meetings the name PinK was born meaning PinK is not Kuip because it partially replaces the Kuip interface to the HERMES software.

In March '95 Wolfgang Wander and Klaus Ackerstaff have been invited to present DAD and PinK at the Programming Techniques Group at CERN. In several sessions it bacame clear that a complete DAD and ADAMO interface has to be included into PinK in a clean object oriented way.
The very positive resonance of the PT group made clear that further development of the two packages is worthwhile but also the "spare time" work of Klaus Ackerstaff would not be sufficient to achieve the final goals. Meanwhile a rapidly increasing number of PinK applications had been developed for HERMES and the need for a revision of the existing code was urgently needed. The documentation of this first PinK version is still available and may give you a guess how things (not only the logo) changed in the meanwhile.

After all MAF finally joined the HERMES software group in April '95 and his first project was to revise and restructure the PinK code in an (more) object oriented manner. This new PinK now has a huge number of commands and methods and a complete reference documentation.

PinK has been presented at the CHEP95 Conference in Rio de Janeiro. After W. Wander gave a talk on DAD, K. Ackerstaff presented PinK and some of the applications at HERMES (MAF again missed the opportunity to come to Barzil). A lot of the trends in Computing in High Energy Physics which emerged at this conference are realized in these two packages. The response to the talks was good, people from Fermilab, ANL and CERN are interested in the software and have partially installed it. An online demonstration of the HERMES monitoring system based on DAD and PinK was given in addition to the scheduled talks.
The slides from the talk at CHEP95 are available on the PinK publication and image page

Version 0.27

• Fixed bug in table method setformat
• Fixed bug in table browser (Columns of an array could not be configured)

Version 0.27

• Minor bug fixes in the browser.
• New startup procedure: pink and floyd will now look for pinkrc and floydrc in the pinklib directory, user scripts are started from there (this allows central startup files).
• Compressed DAD files can be read (new option -z for dadOpenFile, dadHost and dadDoConnect)
• New dad function dadComprLevel
• Bug fixed in dadParse
• Expressions can now be defined and displayed in addition to table columns
• Fixed bug in table select method

Version 0.26

• New functions dadParse and createFH.
• Fixed minor bugs in pinklib
• Various changes to pb:
  • Paste works now for all editable text entries
  • The table viewer was improved: Works now also on BW-displays, got a real menu, column output format now configurable, columns can be hidden, a DAD row selector might be defined, table contents can be saved in ASCII format.
  • The GAF/DAD file controlers were improved: A selector for records to be read can be specified, pb can loop (slowly) over all records of an input file.
  • An analysis tool is available to create ASCII Ntuple output as well as HBOOK objects (together with Manfred Ferstl's hister package)

Version 0.25

• New dad command dadOpenSHM.
• New dad methods MWrite and MRead.
• New flags for various dad commands:
  • -urbwgcm for dadOpenFile
  • -urbwgkm for dadOpenPipe
  • -urbwgte for dadOpenDB
  • -urbwgkmncte for dadHost and dadDoConnect
• dadHost no longer adds the -g flag in special cases.
• The Browser can now handle dad multi files in a primitiv manner.
• The Disconnect method on dad objects now frees internal memory even if dadDisconnect fails (minor bug).
• The archives of tcl 7.3, Tk 3.6 and BLT 1.7 are now available on the PinK installation page.

Version 0.24

• Added new table methods fetcol and repcol. (inscol is coded but seems to be buggy in the current ADAMO distribution.)
• Minor bug fixes in the (yet undocumented) pinklib.

Version 0.23

• Fixed a severe bug in floydl causing floyd scripts to crash.
• Error messages from after functions will be printed now by floyd.
• Removed the signal handling for SIGCHLD again - see TCL book pg. 319 for handling of background processes.
• Added the command detachProcs to force the redemption of zombies.
• Added the wcbsize table method.
• Use the dad time conversion functions in strftime and getUtime.
• getUtime now prints a warning to replace it by strftime/gettime.

Version 0.22

• Again some minor changes in the configuration script were made.
• The browser can now read DAD Files and Pipes, the command line interface changed.
• Added the new method Dataflow for DAD objects.
• Changed command line interface for the dadDoConnect command for DAD objects.
• "tabobj setfield field NULL" is now possible for fields of the type REL.
• Some internal changes in the getfield table method.
• Added two new table methods for Relationship handling: relations and getrelation.

Version 0.21

• Again some minor changes in the configuration script were made.
• The command getobj is now available.
• An (unsupported) alpha version of the browser pb is now part of the distribution.
• A bug was fixed in src/interface/getfieldvalue.c preventing "tabobj setfield field NULL" from being executed correctly for fields of the type REAL. "tabobj getfield" now returns ANY for REAL fields carrying the value RANY. (Thanks to Mike Beddo (beddo@p2hp2.lanl.gov) for this reports.)
• cprint and csave are no longer supported in PinKLib.
• Added the new function getprintername in pinklib called by tprint if necessary.

Version 0.20

• The first column of a table to be created has to have the name ID and the type SNUM. crteab now checks for that.

Version 0.19

• The ADAMO SETCHK call is now available as the PinK command setchk.
  The dafault ADAMO debugging level is now NONE. This speeds up PinK scripts up to 2500% !
  Tip: During development and debugging you should set the debugging level to ALL.
• The startup procedure is different now: dadInit is now a standalone command and not longer executed automatically at startup.
  Tip: To use old scripts relying on that behaviour simply insert dadInit in your ~/.pinkrc and ~/.floydrc startup scripts.
• There is now an Alphabetical Index of all PinK commands.
• The documentation is now available as tar-file for local installation.
• Again some changes in the installation procedure had to be made.
• Some minor changes in the HV example were made.

Version 0.18

• Some minor changes in the installation procedure were made.
• floyd now prints results and error messages immediately (unbuffered) in interactive mode.
• The handling of PSTRING arguments (see cfortran.h) was corrected. This avoids possible strange behavior of the following commands and methods:
  cresel, creind, topdfl, getobj, grabobj, fetdfl, fettab, TABLE(various), GAF(askkey,getkeytable), DFL(ask,name).

Version 0.17

• The windowless floyd and floydy shells are ready to be used (Thanks to the special guest programmer Wolfgang Wander).

Version 0.16

• The PinKlib was revised and some new features were added.
• ~/.pinkrc is executed in any case (not only for interactive PinKs).
• strftime now should work on all systems.
• The exprselect method for selectors was added.
• The dad Message method will report unknown tables as "ID TabID".
• A bug in user defined formatting of string fields was found and solved (table getfield method).
• Empty strings can now be supplied for the servername, type and port argument of the dadHost procedure to save the current settings.
• As documented dadHost now expects the ADAMO name for the dataflow (not longer the PinK name).

(pre)Version 0.15

• There are no revision remarks available for this period.

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