[Rivet] Rivet release plans: 1.8.3, 2.0.0, and 3.x ;-)

[Andy Buckley]

Hi all,

Those of you that get the SVN commit mails are probably aware that
Hendrik and I have been doing a *lot* of coding in the last few days.
We've pretty much ticked off everything on our Rivet TODO lists for both
the YODA trunk and the AIDA branch, and envisage making releases (1.8.3
and 2.0.0b1) in the next few days :-)

I've said it many times before, but this time I think 1.8.3 really is a
very serious candidate for "last ever 1.x release"... to the extent that
we propose locking the branch after its release, unless some really
serious problem turns up in the 2.0 beta. Any strong opposition to that
idea?

I'm very pleased that the conversion to YODA and some other
fixes/changes have really cleaned things up and open up a lot of
development possibilities in future. In particular, we think we finally
have a NICE solution for handling NLO counter-events and multi-weight
analysis with minimal overhead, both computational and in terms of
impact on user code. In fact, it could make user code *simpler*!
Probably there are some yet-unseen pitfalls, but this is quite exciting:
more details another time. This is where the "3.x" comes into the
release plan: I think there will be a *much* shorter time interval
between 2.0 and 3.0 than between 1.0.and 2.0... but if we can make it
work it will be a big change.

The remaining TODOs for a proper 2.0.0 release are to address the
remaining "todo YODA" comments (in 19 analyses), and to work out what's
going on with the histo division bug reported by James (it seems to be
working in the standard analyses that have already been converted).
There are other things on the list, such as providing new yoda2root and
flat2root scripts, but one nice thing about factorising the
histogramming is that those will now live in YODA and are factorised
from Rivet: the collection of rivet-* scripts will be quite reduced.

Any offers to pre-beta test the SVN trunk or an alpha tarball would be
much appreciated: it all helps but we are definitely on the home
straight now... at last!

I will add tickets for our other ideas to the HepForge tracker when I
get a spare moment.

Cheers,
Andy (& Hendrik)

-- 
Dr Andy Buckley, Royal Society University Research Fellow
Particle Physics Expt Group, University of Edinburghx

The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
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