[Rivet] Getting Rivet and AGILe released

[Jonathan Butterworth]

Hi Andy et al,

We have one more session today. I think the general perception is that 
the first day involving rivet was close to the edge. Some say it was a 
disaster, some 5/10. Many (mostly small) irritating problems. However, 
not all of them were rivet issues. Also most of the students seemed 
reasonably content anyway - I think the generator authors and practical 
organisers felt the pain most. Certainly we would not have have been 
happy if all days had been like that.

Yesterday, after much work from several people (testing code before hand 
on the actual system here, and thinking through the physics instructions 
more) I think we would call an unqualified success. As far as I know 
there were no rivet/agile issues, and we spent nearly all the time 
discussing the physics and the generators.

So we have to maintain that today. Then to be honest I think James 
deserves a day or two off ;)

But I agree we should release the "MCnet school" version ASAP and if 
James can do this great - I am away for two weeks now too.

We need to define some acceptance tests for rivet/agile releases. I 
think a matrix of analyses X generators with green, yellow or red boxes 
(works, not tested, broken) would be a good start. I think for the MCnet 
school we should use the tutorial experience as the acceptance test, but 
still produce the matrix. For future releases we can think further. In 
particular we could ask some users to become testers for some parts of 
the releases.

My feeling is that from this school onwards, assuming today also goes 
well, we are likely to have a step up in number of users. Important to 
maintain the momentum and not piss them off.

Cheers,
Jon



Andy Buckley wrote:
> Hi y'all,
> 
> I'm going to be on holiday for the next week, but given that we failed
> so comprehensively to hit our release deadlines for Rivet and AGILe last
> week, I'd like to get them released before I get back, so that the MCnet
> students can try them out if they want! (By the way, how did the
> sessions go?)
> 
> So I'm going to point the finger at James, and nominate him as being in
> charge of getting the packages officially released. Just a question of
> squashing any known bugs, test with the bootstrap on lxplus, update the
> version number, make the tarballs and create new SVN tags... I hope we
> can finally do it this week ;) However, if the bugs continue to appear
> as interminably as they have this week, then I think keeping the beta
> tarballs updated is important: we don't want to make a release that we
> know contains serious bugs.
> 
> I'm looking forward to getting this release under our belts: every time
> we have to make a release, it blocks all the interesting new things we
> could be doing... although it's also a very good way to find bugs!
> 
> Bye for now,
> Andy
> 

-- 
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Prof. Jonathan Butterworth,              http://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/~jmb/ 

Physics and Astronomy Department                  Tel: +44 20 7679 3444
University College London                 Gower St, London WC1E 6BT, UK
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