Internal Externals

Proposal

For Pass8 GlastRelease will need access to all the irfs packages.  Rather than adding these packages in the usual way, the proposal has been made to put them in their own external and put all the packages they depend on (facilities, astro, etc.) in another external.  ST and GR would then link to both of these externals. GRBAnalysis could also.

Alternative #1

Put all of the above in a single external.   ST, GR and GRBAnalysis all need all of these things. 

Pro:  would simplify bookkeeping somewhat

Con: irfs could be much more volatile than the other packages

Alternative #2

Put all of the above plus other common packages (celestialSources, flux, xmlBase) into a single new external.

Pro: as in #1.  Additionally, would reduce size of GR and ST further which could help somewhat with CVS lock problems

Con: Same as #1.  Also GRBAnalysis doesn't use the extra packages (but there is no requirement it link to them all; we could define library groups as we do for ROOT)

Organization in CVS repository

For each new internal external, make a new container with sym links to the packages to be included.

For each existing container which will link to one or more new internal externals (GlastRelease, ScienceTools and maybe GRBAnalysis), make a brand-new container with sym links to packages as before, but excluding those in the internal externals.

Candidate Packages for Internal Externals

See table below indicating dependencies among packages (or package collections like irfs) and on "real" externals and some indication of volatility.