[Rivet] Rivet issues with Genser libraries

Andy Buckley andy.buckley at durham.ac.uk
Fri Jan 25 14:10:51 GMT 2008


Hi Alberto,

Quite a long time ago, we (Rivet developers) decided together with
Genser that we would stop maintaining our own parallel generator
bundles, which used autoconf and libtool, and move to using Genser's
libraries. Genser, particularly Witek, have been very supportive and
helpful. We finally got round to properly migrating to the Genser
distributions in the last few weeks, and it's not been a simple process,
with a lot of problems remaining.

In summary, our major problem is that the Genser libraries aren't
portably buildable on platforms other than Scientific Linux with the
CERN AFS area mounted in the usual place. We need a more generally
useful set of generators, since our users and developers are using
laptops, Apple Macs and various versions of Linux other than SL(C). We
also need some portable and reliable way of automatically assembling a
local build of the whole Genser AFS area, with a documented and
programmatic directory structure.

More specifically, we've set up a wiki page for AGILe (our generator
interface library) which catalogues our problems:
http://projects.hepforge.org/agile/trac/wiki/GenserBuildProblems
We can translate these problems into bugs on the Genser Savannah
tracker, if it's being used --- my impression at the moment is that it
isn't.

We're very happy to help Genser to fix these problems --- it's in our
interest to do so and we already have experience of maintaining portable
builds of Fortran generators via autotools: this could be easily
extended to provide the LCG features that Genser needs.
My impression is that Rivet is a testbed for Genser usage which can help
to improve the overal robustness of the system against changes in the
way that LCG platforms work. So, despite being lower priority than the
experiments, I think that our needs are far from contradictory to
theirs. Please let me know what you think and if we can be of assistance...

Cheers,
Andy



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