This repository shall be the common code basis of acqu users within the A2 collaboration. It will (at least) cover the calibration and a simple physics analysis (TO BE DONE).

However, this master branch is still under heavy development and many changes could break your workflow or personal code. But this will improve!

So be warned, but don't hesitate to fork this repo here and contribute your personal changes if there useful by providing pull requests.

• CERN ROOT > 5.30 with MySQL support (enabled by default, if you have mysql development files installed)
• CMake > 2.8 (most Linux distributions provide packages)
• Zlib and Ncurses development packages (see also troubleshooting)
• git
• Doxygen for documentation support (nicely integrated into QtCreator)

You probably want to create a GitHub account and fork from this repository. Then clone this personal "acqu" distribution (it is still very easy to get updates later).

If you have a working ROOT installation you can use these commands to get ready to build acqu:

Ubuntu 10.04.4: sudo apt-get install git-core cmake zlib1g-dev doxygen libncurses-dev

With CMake, it is required to build "outside" of the source directory (e.g. in an empty subfolder). Thus, we create an extra build sub-directory including all Makefiles (execute in "acqu" basedir containing acqu_core, acqu_user, ...):

mkdir build && cd build && cmake ..

Note that the two dots in the end really mean the parent directory (where the central CMakeLists.txt is located). Furthermore, it defaults to Debug mode and tells you exactly where the to-be-built libraries and binaries are located. You might want to add the binary path to your PATH environment (but if you use QtCreator, not even that is required).

Then start the parallel compilation for example on a QuadCore machine as

make -j5

You can also create some documentation with

make doc

If you already opened QtCreator before, it should tell you that it registered automatically the generated help file.

If you want to build only the DAQ part (no analysis), change the above cmake call to

mkdir build && cd build && cmake -DACQU_DAQ=On ..

which also automatically detects and includes EPICS, if available.

With the new CMake system, it is very easy to use QtCreator as an Integrated Development Environment. Just ensure that your version is recent enough (something like 2.5). Then do the following to set it up in QtCreator:

1. Import the acqu project as a CMake project by opening the CMakeLists.txt in the basedir. A wizard dialog should pop up.

2. You should get asked for a build directory. Create a new subdir build and choose that. You can also choose an already existing one.

3. Run cmake from the GUI as required from the Wizard and check if it found the correct ROOT installation. If it did not find the correct one, either remove your ROOTSYS environment variable or add one by starting QtCreator from the console like this: ROOTSYS=/path/to/root qtcreator &.

4. Then set the working directory in "Project (left tab) --> Run Settings" to your acqu_user directory and provide the correct *.dat file to AcquRoot as an argument. At this point, you can also set -j5 as an argument to make in the build settings tab.

5. Hit F5 and you should be able to build, run and debug AcquRoot. That means you can set breakpoints, have sophisticated code completion and a Doxygen-driven help system. You can still use in parallel the command line, if you find that more useful in some cases.

• If the detection of some libraries still fails despite installing the necessary *-dev packages from your distribution, delete CMakeCache.txt in your build directory and run cmake again. In general, cmake caches already found packages and also settings, so don't be confused by this "feature".
• Note that with CMake no environment variables are really needed anymore. This is why all setup files have been deleted. However, you might want to add the binary directory to your PATH environment.
• Since the .gitignore's have changed, you can get rid of old build files by git clean -fdn, which lists all files, and if that is okay, delete them with git clean -fd.
• If the compilation fails, check if you have some previous ROOT Dictionary source files. You can find them by find | grep Dict (in basedir) and if that lists only unneeded files delete them by find | grep Dict | xargs rm. Also git should report some of them as untracked (see above item how to get rid of them).
• If you just want to run AcquRoot, then the Debug mode (=no optimizations) can be unnecessarily slow. Enable the Release mode by executing cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .. inside the build directory (can also be a new build directory).
• If you're changing header files and compiling breaks, a make clean could help since not all dependencies are correctly identified at the moment (but most should be!).
• If the help in QtCreator does not work (i.e. F1 does not show you something when the pointer in the editor is located at some acqu class), then try registering manually the help file "build/doc/qthelp.qch" via "Tools --> Options... --> Help". Restart QtCreator.