Software Tools Minutes
                                20 October 1995
                              9:00 AM - 10:15 AM
                            ======================

Present: Pushpa Bhat, John Hobbs, Alan Jonckheere,  Stan Krzywdzinski, 
         Qizhong Li-Demarteau, Lee Lueking, Laura Paterno, 
         Harrison Prosper (from FSU, via a speaker phone), Serban Protopopescu,
         Silvia Repond

Scribe:  Stan Krzywdzinski

    The meeting was devoted to Alan's presentation on the current Code
Management, which is going to be a starting point for our discussion on 
the 3-rd item on our charge list. The written version of the presentation 
entitled:

        "D0Library - Organization, Strengths and Weaknesses"

was handed out to all present and can be found on D0SFT cluster, in a file  
usr$root3:[jonckheere.tools]d0library.txt .
Limitted number of comments and ideas was exchanged during the presentation,
since it was, rightfully so, urged, mainly by Harrison, to forge ahead with the 
presentation and have the discussion after.

The topics of the presentation are listed below, along with the ensuing 
comments, which should be regarded in context of the presentation text.

    o What it is

        - Repository

        - Archival and code management system

      John asked whether currently it is possible to retrieve all the code,
      of a given library, which existed in the past on a certain day, 
      and the answer is yes.

    o Releases

    o Strengths of the current system

      Alan stressed firmly that the main strength of the present system is
      that it does work !

    o Weaknesses of the current system

      Releases take a long time, the worst case is probably STP library - it 
      takes week(s) to get it out, and the University of Hawai is the last 
      one which gets a release. 
      The official version does not seem to work - there is so much coupling 
      between libraries that linking with the official libraries rarely 
      produces a working executable; an exception is RECO. People have 
      'libtest all' in their login.com's because they do not know which 
      versions, official or test, of the libraries they need would be 
      compatible. In the future, Harrison proposed to use the version #'s of 
      the libraries, which implies that a developer would have to select a 
      set of compatible versions out of the available pool.
      John argued that compatibility of the libraries would be secured if 
      a release policy is adopted that every current library becomes an old one
      at the same time. 
      Regarding beta libraries, John an Serban pointed out that they should
      have identical structure as the corresponding D0$CMS libraries; John
      added that the present test and beta versions should actually be replaced 
      by one, say test, version. There are no rules right now on how the beta 
      area should be structured. Laura mentioned prod_db as an example of beta
      area which is not easily mapped to the D0$CMS, due to a number of 
      different utilities and a usage of SQL precompiler; these require at least
      2 level directories, whereas at present CMS allows for one level; CMS 
      with more levels would be easy to implement. 
      Alan remarked that the biggest problem with beta libraries is the code 
      there staying too long.
      Harrison: compilation on all types of machines / platforms in use should
      be made automatic upon a developer attempt to release the code. 
      Alan and Harrison were for all the software residing on one huge disk,
      which could be easily accessible via AFS, enabling cashing of the required
      parts. AFS does not support multiple versions automatically, but again 
      one may have subdirectories.

    o Features of "The Next Generation Library"

The meeting adjourned at 10:15 AM, with the last item of the presentation,
Features of "The Next Generation Library", as well as the full discussion,
postponed till the next meeting(s).