HEPForge is a development environment for any sort of academic software projects related to high-energy physics. We aim to encourage good software development practices in HEP, with a ready-made, easy-to-use set of Web based tools, including:
Typically, such systems are rather awkward to set up and require some expertise in areas that are not "core skills" of physicists, such as Web server configuration, CGI scripts and so-on. By having already done the bulk of the setup work, HepForge provides high-quality software engineering tools for projects which would otherwise not have the resources to set them up.
An additional motivation for HEPForge is to provide a central area for development of a large fraction of the small-to-medium scale software projects in high-energy physics. While we are not designed for large-scale activities such as developing software frameworks for LHC experiments, our system is ideal for smaller groups, such as the developers of phenomenology packages.
In return, we ask developers of HepForge projects to attempt to make the best and most portable software possible, with documentation, user support (our bug tracker and mailing lists can help!) and use of standard methods where possible. We encourage users to use the Subversion version control / code management system and to familiarise themselves with GNU autotools, which can help make their code much more portable (not to mention installable via a very standard interface). We are happy to help project owners with these tools.
For more information about HepForge, please see our presentation to the CHEP06 conference.
HEPForge retains copyright of any works written specifically for HEPForge, such as the HEPForge website, branding, name and logos, although we allow the usage of them under fair use.
HEPForge is a platform for developers, we do not own the copyright nor enforce any rights on the content, codes, artifacts and properties that we host on behalf of persons or projects. All license queries, complaints or disputes should first be raised with the project.
Although in many cases no formal license agreement may be available for various hosted projects, it could be inferred that most projects are "Open Source" and that any license would be similar to the Create Commons BY-NC-SA-4.0, AFL or a Copyleft style license in that the code comes with no liabilities and that it can be modified, altered and re-published as long as attribution is provided and that it is not used for commercial gain and any derivatives are licensed similarly. However we would highly recommend reaching out to the project before hand as we (HEPForge, the platform) have no legal rights or ownership to any hosted project material and we are only providing this as an overall guiadance.
How to contact us.
| General Support Email: | admin@hepforge.org |
|---|---|
| Security & Emergency Email: | oper.ip3@durham.ac.uk |
| Physical Post: | HEPForge Staff, IPPP, Ogden Centre (East), Durham University, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, United Kingdom |