[Rivet] Patch for Rivet to automatically detect available FastJet plugins

[Andy Buckley]

Hi Christian,

As I mentioned separately, I'm not sure about this patch. I think Rivet 
should have consistent runtime behaviour, and throwing runtime 
exceptions for problems in the configuration of external libraries seems 
less desirable than just to throw an error at configure time and request 
that fastjet be properly configured.

Also, from the patch I see that your conversions to use your 
makePlugin() are actually less compact and more "C++-noisy" than what 
was there before -- at the same time as restricting the fj plugin 
constructor signature to just two doubles. This is actually going in the 
opposite direction from what we've been recently doing, which is to 
allow more direct use of fj constructors, etc. That, and the very 
"bitty" #ifdef-y implementation of makePlugin in order to add a runtime 
exception behaviour is not something I'm comfortable with.

I'm maybe missing the motivation/necessity of this behaviour, though. 
What exactly is the use-case that you wrote this patch to handle? Is 
there a reason why it wouldn't be acceptable to just test for all the fj 
plugin headers given in your patch, and throw a configure ERROR if any 
are missing?

Thanks,
Andy



On 06/04/17 16:20, cholm wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Attached is a patch to AutoTools automatically detect the presence of
> FastJet plugins, and - at compile time - only enable support for those
> algorithms.  If the user tries to use any other algorithm it will result
> in an exception.
>
> Note, Rivet::Projections::FastJets now provides a function to make a
> fastjet::JetDefinition::Plugin object directly, so that user analysis
> that need direct access can use this service to make the relevant
> plugins (or throw) - e.g., CDF_2008_S7540469, OPAL_1993_S2692198, and
> STAR_2009_UE_HELEN
>
> Yours,
>
>
>
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>


-- 
Dr Andy Buckley, Lecturer / Royal Society University Research Fellow
Particle Physics Expt Group, University of Glasgow