[Rivet] RE : Rivet issues with Genser libraries

[Mikhail Kirsanov]

 Hello, All,
 I plan to make some experiments with making our scripts more portable. Somewhere
in the first half of february.
 Linking shared libraries with libgfortran for the case of gcc4 is already in our plans.
 And, of course we can meet and discuss.
 Next week I am not available.
                                     Regards, Mikhail


-------- Message d'origine--------
De: Witold Pokorski
Date: ven. 25/01/2008 16:08
À: andy.buckley at durham.ac.uk
Cc: Alberto Ribon; rivet at projects.hepforge.org; David Grellscheid; genser-developers
Objet : Re: Rivet issues with Genser libraries
 
Hi Andy,

before Alberto answers let me say a few words...

First of all sorry for still not having solved the problems you have
reported... Due to my change of the group and the holidays period,
things got stalled a bit...

Anyway, I fully support what you say about Rivet being a testbed for
Genser and I do think we should fix the problems. Unfortunately, (or
fortunately.... ;-) ) it will not be me who will do it as I have already
been basically completely taken by the new duties...

The best thing would be if you, Alberto, Mikhail and maybe myself could
meet and come up with a concrete plan of work (or start discussing it
via email).

Probably the right starting point would be if you could provide us with
'autotoolized' versions of Pythia6 and Herwig from GENSER, so we could
try to test them within our installation procedure and see what king of
adaptation would need to be done.

Cheers,
Witek





On Fri, 2008-01-25 at 14:10 +0000, Andy Buckley wrote:
> 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
>