Code review comment for ~epics-core/epics-base/+git/Com:errlog2syslog

Every site wants to configure their IOCs and startup slightly differently, and I don't have a problem with allowing that. I don't see why you guys don't like having to include commands in your startup scripts to implement the behavior you want though; that caPutLogInit command above doesn't have to appear in the st.cmd file itself, and it shows that you can still use environment variables for configuration parameters along with a startup line.

At APS we collect all our common commands into scripts in a site-specific support module that the st.cmd files executes at the appropriate time. I am working on makeBaseApp templates for the APS Upgrade to make it easy for engineers to generate IOCs that follow our standards. The st.cmd file generated for a soft IOC looks like this:

#!../../bin/linux-x86_64/first

< "envPaths"
< "${IOCSTD}/bin/${ARCH}/envParams.iocsh"

## Connect to log server
iocLogInit

cd "${TOP}"

## Register support components
dbLoadDatabase "dbd/first.dbd"
first_registerRecordDeviceDriver pdbbase

## Load record instances here
#dbLoadRecords "db/first.db", "IOC=${IOC_NAME=${IOC}}"

## Do iocStd pre-initialization
< "${IOCSTD}/bin/${ARCH}/preInit.iocsh"

## Start the IOC running
iocInit

## Start sequence programs here
#seq firstSeq, "IOC=${IOC_NAME=${IOC}}"

## Do iocStd post-initialization
< "${IOCSTD}/bin/${ARCH}/postInit.iocsh"

## Script st.cmd done.

Those three ${IOCSTD}/bin/${ARCH}/*.iocsh scripts implement all the common initialization tasks, and if I need to add or modify something for all our IOCs that's where I make the necessary changes. I suspect ITER uses Ralph's snippets feature to do something similar. You could also have the st.cmd file execute scripts whose path comes from the environment, giving you even more control if that's what you really want.

In my case above I'm putting the iocLogInit command in the st.cmd file instead of a script to allow the engineers to turn logging off if/when they want to because that's something they're used to, but I could put it in the envParams.ioch script instead.