building lcsim software using maven2

Prerequisites

If you are following the lcsim tutorial, then by this point, you should have the following tools installed.

Netbeans 6.5
Maven 2.0.9
Java 1.5 (or 1.6 works too)
Latest JAS3 release candidate (version???)
CVS client of some sort: Tortoise, command-line, Netbeans, etc.

Should this not be the case, backup and install the missing tool.

Overview

The org.lcsim project is comprised of three primary java projects: GeomConverter, lcsim, and lcsim-contrib.

Most users will only want to use lcsim, the reconstruction and analysis packages, and lcsim-contrib, a project that depends on lcsim and is comprised of various user contributions, unfinished/beta code, or works in progress. GeomConverter is for geometry and detector experts who want to create their own detector documents or detector types. A suitable version of GeomConverter will be downloaded automatically by Maven 2 when either lcsim or lcsim-contrib are built.

Building with Maven 2 Command Line

All the org.lcsim projects use the Maven 2 build tool, which is like make and a package manager rolled into one.

To get started, first checkout the lcsim project using your cvs client.

This is a bash command-line example.

export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.freehep.org:/cvs/lcd
cvs login (press enter)
cvs checkout lcsim
cd lcsim
mvn

The lcsim jar will be installed into your local maven repository and will be used by dependent projects, such as lcsim-contrib.

The instructions are virtually the same for lcsim-contrib; simply replace "lcsim" by "lcsim-contrib" in the above example.

Skipping the Tests

Sometimes it is useful to skip the tests.

Set the skipTests property at the command line.

mvn -DskipTests=true

Increasing the Java Heap and Perm Size

The LCSim tests can take up more memory than the default heap/perm size assigned to the java VM.

Use this environment variable setting to allocate more memory, i.e. 1 gigabyte heap / 256 megabyte perm, to maven.

MAVEN_OPTS="-Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m"

If you are building the lcsim documentation, including running all the tests, you are required to increase the heap size beyond the initial default of 256 megabytes. Otherwise, the target will fail due to an "out of memory" error.