murmur: A message generator and reporter for Unix, VMS and VxWorks

摘要

This paper describes the software product, ''murmur,'' a message generation, reporting, display and logging software system that we have developed for use in data acquisition systems at Fermilab. ''murmur'' is a tool for the production and management of message reporting. Its usefulness ranges from software product development and maintenance to system level shakedown and diagnostics. ''murmur'' provides a VMS MESSAGE-like function code generation utility, a client routine package for sending these codes over the network to a central server, and a server which translates the codes into meaningful visual information, writes the information to a logfile and displays it on X windows. Information associated with message codes such as message text, message color, X display configuration and routing information, and other related information are kept in fast access keyed files and can be modified by a set of Motif based configuration editors. As a result, ''murmur'' provides advanced features such as popping up help when a displayed message is clicked on by the mouse and executing ''action'' shell scripts when selected messages are received by the server. The server and editors are written in C++ for extensibility and maintainability, and are currently available on Sun and SGI systems. The client library is written in C, and has a Fortran binding as well. Clients are supported on SGI IRIX, Sun SunOS, IBM AIX, DEC ULTRIX, VAX VMS, and under the VxWorks real-time kernel operating system.