Core Minutes 28 September 2010

Core Minutes 9/28/2010

Present: Joanne Bogart, Anders Borgland, Toby Burnett, Jim Chiang, Richard Dubois, Tom Glanzman, Elizabeth Hays, Heather Kelly, David Landriu, Leon Rochester, Tom Stephens, Eric Winter

ScienceTools: (Jim) has updated some ST unit tests to avoid problems similar to one fixed earlier. He tried to make a new ST tag but was stymied by various SCons RM troubles; see SCons discussion below for details.
FSSC: (Eric W.) FSSC has a requirement that it must be able to provide a ROOT-free version of releases. The newest ST tags have a new dependence on ROOT which violates this requirement. (Jim) thinks it can be avoided but it will take some time to work out the implementation. (Eric) That's good enough for now.
GR Pass8: (Leon) See a nice presentation of the Pisa Group's work on a Naive Bayes Cluster Classifier, given at Monday's C&A meeting.

Tracy is getting tree-based pattern recognition into CVS. Leon is going to be extracting Robert's cosmic ray code, which is now in ComboPatRec as a last step, into a separate Tool, or maybe just a jo setting of ComboPatRec, so it can be called when and if we want it, even if we move to Tree-based pattern recognition overall.

He is also looking into updating the geometry. There is a lot of missing mass. A small but possibly significant part of that is wrappers around the tiles. To model that in detail would be a nightmare. Bill has suggested that putting a sheet of the proper material in front (e.g., add on to blanket) and behind might suffice. We're also missing the screws; current model only has screw holes.
Core talk:
- Gaudi (Heather) All of the Guadi updates have been committed on a branch of the latest tag, v18r6p1. It's in good shape on Linux — most test programs run — but there are problems on Windows connected with TkrUtil. The next step will be to merge with a recent HEAD, thereby incorporating Joanne's SCons upgrades.
- SCons RM (Tom S., Heather, Jim, Joanne) There have been a variety of problems, now all more or less addressed.
  
  Instead of retriggering a LATEST build, as Jim had requested, Joanne accidentally started up a bogus LATEST-1-8066. This quickly failed, since there was no corresponding tag, but subsequent LATEST builds continued in the sequence (LATEST-1-8067, etc.), not a fatal problem but undesirable.
  
  All of the subsequent LATEST builds had a sprinkling of test program failures because the xml subdirectory of flux hadn't been checked out. This was traced to a stale lock file in this subdirectory in CVS.
  
  In the process of cleaning up the LATEST detritus Tom accidentally killed processes devoted to making HEAD builds, so those builds got hung up.
  
  On a more positive note, (Tom S.) got TMineRelease builds up and running in record time. It was straightforward after having just enabled SCons builds of GR.
- Other SCons news (Joanne) The problem she had been stuck on (bizarre failure in OnboardFilter code when running test_Gleam) for some days before leaving on vacation was fixed soon after returning by adding more libraries to the link of Gleam and test_Gleam.
  
  Work on the new _setup is complete except for a couple commits to CVS and tags. She is waiting until the RM problems above are fully resolved and there is an up-to-date LATEST build without her new tags, then will commit and tag. The new scheme differs from the old in three respects:
  - The PFILES environment variable is only set for containers that need it (currently just ScienceTools)
  - When PFILES is set, Jim's simplified logic is used
  - On Windows the setup file is now _setup.bat (rather than _setup.js). The .bat file plays more nicely with GoGui and may also be easier for users to deal with.
  - CMT RM Things are not entirely rosy there, either. (Leon) notes that the latest LATEST GR build, VC8debug tag, is stuck.
  - Snow Leopard (Tom S., Heather) We're still waiting for SCS to make a suitable queue. Tom has filed an issue for this request. Tom also needs to make Snow Leopard builds of RM tools.
  - tip fix (Heather) James committed an update to address problems Toby had seen with the VS 2008 compiler. (Toby) With the new tag test_tip no longer fails immediately, but it does still fail. He has no time to investigate further. (Heather) will try to reproduce the problem so that she can pass more information to James.
  - Windows questions (Heather) would like to know what has become of the new Windows server we were supposed to get. And will XP support really be turned off at the end of this year? (Richard) Just asked about the new server. He expects an answer from David Leung shortly. As for the transition to Windows 7: things have been mysteriously quiet. With no news of a migration plan, he can't believe XP will disappear in 3 months. [Post meeting update: The new server is on site. Richard has asked SCS about Windows 7 transition; now awaiting reply.]

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