[Rivet] Phone/Skype meeting

[Andy Buckley]

Hi Riveters,

It's been a long time since we had a coherent discussion, and with 
ever-growing use of Rivet I think it would be valuable to touch base 
sometime soon and make sure we maintain some momentum with Rivet so that 
we meet the vague deadlines associated with first Atlas data and next 
rounds of tuning.

Since Hendrik is moving to Durham at the moment, and some of us 
including me will be at an Atlas week next week, I suggest that we have 
a DESY phone conf. or Skype (preferences?) meeting on the afternoon of 
Monday 12 October. This has the additional benefit that we are having a 
Professor meeting in Edinburgh, so more of us will be in one place than 
usual. Sound good? Any preferred time that afternoon?


PRELIM AGENDA:

Issues that are looming large in my mind include:

  * Properly addressing the cross-section/normalisation issue (hopefully 
I'll have fixed the bug in extracting the x-sec from HepMC by then!). I 
would really like to remove all the hard-coded cross-secs from Rivet 
before we next use it "seriously".

  * Getting some manpower on the histogramming upgrade for the 
next-to-next release. I think we need to have a good think about how 
much of the histogramming normalisation, chopping, scaling, etc. should 
be inside Rivet and how much should be in (Python) post-processing scripts.

  * Analyses: focus on more data that we really want to be part of the 
first tunes including LHC data. I think we should make a push on the 
RHIC analyses, and on validation of the "new" UA1 and UA5 analyses.

  * To take some pain out of the validation procedure for the next 
release, and to allow us to be more comprehensive in that validation, I 
think we need to revisit the "validator" idea: I have some lightweight 
code for generating run scripts, which could be really useful if made to 
use the analysis metadata to automatically generate appropriate 
generator steering scripts.

These all require some time, and unfortunately (for you) I'm not going 
to be supplying all of it ;)

Anyone else got favourite Rivet enhancements or bugfixes on their wishlist?

Andy


PS. One *very* important issue: I'd like to make our next release 
"1.2.0" rather than "1.1.4". Two reasons: first, there is a major and 
incompatible change to the plugin system; second, our current use of the 
release numbering is so conservative that I fear it makes us look like a 
bunch of lazy "slow patchers", while other HEP tools rocket through the 
version numbers like there's no tomorrow. Just psychology, but I think 
no less important for that ;) Any opposition/comments? (I would expect 
the SHERPAs on the list to have some comments about conservative version 
incrementing!)

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