Software Tools Minutes 6 October 1995 9:00AM - 10:00AM ====================== Present: Drew Baden, Pushpa Bhat, Stu Fuess, John Hobbs, Al Jonchkeere, Stan Krzywdzinski, Lee Leuking, Qizhong Li-Demarteau, Brent May, Laura Paterno, Serban Protopopescu, Harrison Prosper, Silvia Repond Scribe: Laura Paterno Harrison started off the meeting by going through the Draft proposal for our recommendations for Text Editing and Document/News Management. Most of the draft was excepted as is (save for grammar mistakes of course). A few changes were made. I list a brief description of the discussions below. Text Editing ============ One of the suggestions was to perhaps support the EVE keybindings in EMACS. This recommendation was rejected after deciding that it would just be too much work to have someone maintain this for D0. It was also suggested that an Appendix be added to the back of the recommendation that described the common EMACS and D0 extensions to EMACS so that people could start using it now. Pushpa pointed out that she had such a page already available on the Web as part of the D0 Migration to Unix pages. It was agreed that the section for EMACS would be included in an Appendix in the back along with whatever D0 extensions to it already exist. It was also recommended that we come up with a set of things we would like to have in EMACS (language templates with color coding, D0 headers, keybindings, etc) and then we ask the Computing Divisions help in creating it. Document/News Management ======================== We discussed that there should be a standard way to access all of the primary source files. One suggestion was to have the source available through HTML as well as the HTML version. No definite decisions were reached but it was agreed that this was definitely a good things to have. The above brought up a discussion on Web Browsers and how it would be very nice not to have to search through all the areas on the D0 home page to find things but to have the entire directory structure at the root page to be able to immediately go to where you want. For managing all the HTML links especially when new links are made or old links are removed it was agreed that some sort of automated tool should be made to handle this. The next issue was how far do we go with Security. It was felt by all that the system should certainly have Security features available but no real agreement was reached as to how far that Security should go. The recommendation at the end of the Draft to create two groups was discussed as we want to keep the number of new groups in check. Since groups already exists that perform some of the tasks already it was felt we would formalize part of the tasks that they should do. On to (c) & (d)... ================== Once we finished with the Draft recommendations we started with (c) code management and (d) compilers/debuggers. The compilers/debuggers discussion was tabled as the languages and data structures group has not yet made their recommendations to us. Harrison then started the discussion on code management by saying that there were lots of recommendations which came out of CHEP and he would make that information available to us. Stu and Laura pointed out that CDF also just had a Workshop which stated some of the things they would be doing. They agreed to get that list from Liz Sexton-Kennedy at CDF. The discussion then turned to what do we think Code Management should be and Drew B. suggested we see we currently have working now. It was agreed that Alan J. would make a presentation of what currently exists, what's good with it and what's not. Issues which arose from the general discussion of code management include: ========================================================================== 1) Is a pull mechanism good for getting products to remote institutions (& locally as well) or do we need more than that for code distribute. 2) Should code management cover from the initial private writing of the software all the way through to production. 3) What about release versions? Currently there are no ALPHA or BETA versions available on UNIX. Should there be? 4) How do we handle releasing on multiple platforms? Do we have to have a preprocessor? What about using compiler switches to help this? (many agreed that this was a BAD BAD thing to do). 5) How do we logically organize our releases. 6) What should librarians be responsible for? Should there be requirements and test programs which must be passed before code can go into the library. Currently none exist. 7) What about Code Reviewing? Currently it isn't done for the most part. Should it be done? Many felt yes it should be. The meeting adjourned a little after 10AM.