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.
Name |
Pkg dependencies |
External Dependencies |
Recent tags |
Used by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
facilities |
(none) |
Swig (build time only) |
Oct 2012, Aug. 2012 |
GR, ST, GRBAnalysis |
tip |
facilities |
ROOT, cfitsio |
Nov 2012, Aug 2012 |
GR, ST, GRBAnalysis |
astro |
facilities, tip |
CLHEP, cfitsio |
Jan 2013; Nov. 2012, Oct. 2012 |
GR, ST, GRBAnalysis |
st_stream |
(none) |
(none) |
July 2009 (!) |
GR, ST, GRBAnalysis |
st_facilities |
astro |
cfitsio, f2c, cppunit |
April 2013, Dec. 2012, Nov 2012.. |
GR, ST, GRBAnalysis |
embed_python |
(none) |
(none) |
April 2013, Aug 2012 |
GR, ST, GRBAnalysis |
irfs* |
astro,tip, st_facilities |
CLHEP, f2c, ROOT |
April 2013, Jan 2013, Dec 2012, Nov 2012 |
GR, ST, GRBAnalysis |
xmlBase |
facilities |
xerces |
Aug 2012 |
GR, ST |
flux |
xmlBase, astro |
CLHEP, cfitsio |
Aug 2012, May 2012 |
GR, ST |
celestialSources |
faciliites, flux, astro, |
ROOT, CLHEP, cfitsio |
March 2013, Nov 2012, Aug 2012 |
GR, ST |
irfs will be pared down slightly for the new external in order to reduce the number of other packages required. irfs/irfLoader and irfs/handoff_response will be modified to build only the library. Or irfs/handoff_response could be eliminated entirely since it's not needed by GR.
Sandbox Experience
To start I'm going with alternative #1: single internal external including irfs and minimal other packages to make it self-contained: facilities, tip, astro, st_stream, st_facilities and embed_python. The new internal is provisionally called "CommonExt". After making changes to irfs/irfLoader and irfs/handoff-response as described above I built it with SCons, using option --variant=NONE to produce a build suitable for export.
A Snag
The facilities package does some special things at build time which impact the entire container. It creates a file config.h in the facilities/src directory and the file src/commonUtilities.cxx has a #include for this file. The contents of config.h is a macro defining the set of packages in the container, something commonUtilities needs to know in order to properly define environment variables at run-time so that, for example, job options files and xml files may be found. Each container must have its own compilation of commonUtilities.