Requirements on ConfigSystem

The purpose of ConfigSystem is to generate valid LATC_XML and LCI_XML files and to load those files into MOOT so that they can be accessed both by the mission planning tools and by the offline software. While MOOT takes care of tracking configurations as well as building and managing flight software binary files needed to load those configuration, ConfigSystem handles converting concise ``human-readable'' descriptions of the intent of the configuration into full-blown descriptions of all the register settings. In general ConfigSystem is a tool to keep track of:

1. Intent in configuring ``mode'' registers, which are generally all set to the same ``broadcast'' value.
2. Optimal values of timing registers, which are generally all set to the same ``broadcast'' value.
3. Calibrations to use in generating settings for threshold registers, which generally have different values for each instance of the register.
4. Threshold levels to use with calibrations, so that threshold settings may be expressed in terms of physically meaningful quantities such as Energy or Minimum-Ionizing Particle (MIP) equivalent.
5. Loop structure and scan ranges when running LCI tests.

Given the set of inputs above, ConfigSystem must generate valid XML inputs for flight software tools to build configurations.

Since we wish to change different parts of the configuration asynchronously, the LATC configuration building process divides the LATC configuration into many pieces or precincts. The precincts are chosen as a best guess for how we intend to change LATC configurations. Any group of settings that we are likely to wish to modify as a group make up a precinct and each precinct can be managed independently.