Core Minutes 7 September 2010

Core Minutes 9/7/2010

Present: Joanne Bogart, Jim Chiang, Richard Dubois, Elizabeth Ferrara, Heather Kelly, David Landriu, Chuck Patterson, Tom Stephens, Eric Winter

ScienceTools: (Jim) Collaboration Meeting last week pre-empted Science Tools work. (Current tag is ScienceTools-09-18-03, made on Aug. 30th. ed.)
Notes from Collaboration Meeting: (Chuck) took pictures of a large fraction of those attending. See updates to the Picture Gallery.

(Richard) Status and goals of Pass 8 work were summarized nicely in Robert Johnson's presentation. For a clear and complete description of Pass 7 status, see Eric Charles' presentation from the C & A session.
Hardware: (Richard) Our hardware budget was approved by IFC. This is or is about to be a problem area because of Oracle's new and very unpleasant pricing policy. The quote they gave us for the next set of servers apparently incorporated no discount at all, unacceptable to us by a wide margin. After complaints, they responded with an offer of a 30% discount which we had to agree to that very day; also unacceptable. We are investigating other vendors. In the short term we can use some of Babar's spare servers.
Core talk:
- Disks and servers (Heather) u05 had been very full. That situation has now been alleviated. Kim archived items which had been identified as only of historical interest and they have since been zapped. Usage of u05 is now under 90%. Next on the list to be archived: ancient externals.
  
  (Richard) There have been repeated problems with u52 requiring physical reset recently. It has 10 gazillion L1 files on it, conservatively speaking. Warren will come up with a strategy to ease the situation; e.g., we could write new files somewhere else. (Jim) ASP uses u52 to stage files. It's bad news if the disk goes offline. (Richard) There is a server available for this kind of thing, one of u41 or u42. ASP could switch to using it.
- SCons and Windows builds (Heather) Fixes to tip so that it will compile with VS 2008 are still due from James Peachey (he had hoped to get to it by end of August). There is also a request from Tom G. for changes to tip to support the latest production release of cfitsio but that's less critical; he has a work-around.
  
  What about the new box we're supposed to get for Windows builds? (Richard) No news yet. He'll follow up.
- SCons and Snow Leopard (Tom S.) He can get builds to go by hand (SCons 1.3.0 and python 2.5.x; can't use python 2.6 though), but not in batch jobs. For one thing, there is no appropriate queue defined A request was made for such a thing a while ago.
  
  He hasn't been able to build RM on Snow Leopard. Mysteriously, the build gets configured for a 64-bit machine, even though it's running on 32-bit. He will try running Tiger-built executables on Snow Leopard.
- SCons various (Joanne) gave a presentation at the Pass 8 workshop recently, particularly geared for developers (from both Windows and Linux worlds) acquainted with CMT and interested in GR under SCons. Linux developers expressed an interest in having a GR build to play with. With Heather's help I've promoted about 80 packages to GR HEAD (1303) so that nearly complete SCons support is in there (only "nearly" because, subsequently I discovered a problem in OnboardFilter, not yet fixed).
  
  Other recent odd jobs include:
  - Fixed creation of source distribution (Johann had discovered certain directories were being left out).
  - Made sym links for scons at SLAC so that it should now be in typical user's path
  - Reworking of setup scripts with simplified PFILES handling is nearly done
- Gaudi (Heather) All the Gaudi-mandated changes to our code are now committed on a branch of v18r6p1; she's been checking it out with unit tests and the end is in sight! There is an issue concerning CRflux, on hold for now.
- RM II web (Heather) Karen put up a new version of the site in a development area (or go to the main site and click on the "New Builds" link to the right). It's much improved, incorporating all Jim's requests for the front page. Karen is waiting for more input before moving it to production.
- Build systems: where to go from here? (Richard) sees 3 possibilities:
  1. Joanne continues head-banging in an attempt to provide adequate Windows developer support with SCons
  2. We put effort into adding VS 2008 support to our current version of CMT (v1r18).
  3. We move to the latest CMT release (v1r22), thereby getting VS 2008 for free, perhaps adding 2010 on our own.
  (Heather) v1r22 just came out. They originally claimed solid support for Snow Leopard for this release but have backtracked somewhat. They claim support for VS 2008, which is yet to be confirmed; however by their own admission the "support" requires some tweaking. Other sources indicate old problems with maintenance and unresponsiveness to users have not disappeared.
  
  (Joanne) is not opposed to options 2 or 3 as long as she's not involved in CMT/Windows work. As for 1., there is more work to do, but nothing especially daunting and no known show-stoppers. We should soon be at a point where the true connoisseurs of the Windows environment will be able to weigh in.

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