[Halld-offline] Offline software meeting minutes 9/19/2012

[David Lawrence]

Hi Offliners,

   Better late than never, the minutes of last week's Offline Software 
meeting have been posted. Find them on the wiki at the following link or 
the less-nicely-formatted copy below.

https://halldweb1.jlab.org/wiki/index.php/GlueX_Offline_Meeting,_September_19,_2012

As always, please feel free to modify as you see fit for any omissions 
or errors.

Regards,
-David



==Minutes==

Present:

'''JLab:''' David L. (chair), Elliott W., Dmitry R.

'''UConn:''' Richard J.

'''CMU:''' Curtis M., Paul M., Will L.

'''IU:''' Matt S.


=== Announcements ===
None.

=== Review of Minutes from Previous Meeting ===
As we reviewed the previous meeting's minutes, we took a moment to 
refresh our memories on the status of CCDB deployment. Dmitry reported 
that he has run reconstruction using both CCDB and the files from 
subversion. The results were (nearly) identical. He also reported that 
Mark has produced a script that can generate a CCDB compatible SQLite 
file. Some HOWTO documentation is forthcoming so others can start 
beta-testing the CCDB. It should be available by the collaboration meeting.

=== Truth on Monte Carlo Events ===
Richard gave a report on truth information that is embedded in the Monte 
Carlo events. This has come up as an issue since he has been working on 
the data file size issue as part of the Data Challenge effort. He showed 
some examples where truth information (i.e. information only available 
in simulation and not available in real data) was placed into attributes 
of the HDDM XML specification making it difficult to strip from a file. 
He proposed using subtags instead that could hold the truth information 
while maintaining an easily identifiable association with a "hit". He 
showed an example and it was generally agreed that this would be a 
better approach. There was some concern expressed that the subtags could 
lead to more complex reconstruction code using the C-interface. Richard 
pointed out that the C++ interface makes the access as simple for the 
attribute style as the subtag style.

A proposed, new HDDM for Hall-D was shown. Richard requested that 
responsible persons for each subsystem look it over and verify that the 
information contained in the sections relevant to that subsystem are 
appropriate. Since there are several changes, these will require several 
changes to the JANA HDDM interface. It may well motivate a re-write 
using only the C++ interface of HDDM. This will probably not happen 
before the collaboration meeting.


=== Data Challenge ===
There was some brief discussion on the Data Challenge activities. The 
main consensus was that the efforts seem to be progressing along nicely, 
thanks much to Mark's efforts at JLab on using the farm and others' 
efforts to work on the data file format (REST) and event size.


=== scan-build Analyzer ===
David reported on his continuing work on using static C++ code analyzers 
to try and identify coding errors or potential issues with the GlueX 
code. This is in response to a recommendation from the Software Review 
committee report from the [[2012 Software Review|Software Review]] last 
June.

Two free products are being investigated. The scan-build analyzer 
utilizes features in the clang-llvm compiler suite. A report on 
sim-recon software was generated a few weeks ago and circulated via the 
offline mailing list. The second is cppcheck and David showed examples 
of reports generated by that and HTML-ified by another free script with 
info from both merged by a script he is working on.

Both products seem to produce lots of false positives which may limited 
their use as these must be sifted through by hand in order to find 
legitimate issues. Further investigation is needed to see what it will 
take to suppress the issues identified in order to make the tools 
useful. It is hoped that at least one of these can be used as part of 
the standard release procedure.


=== Subgroup Reports ===
- Tracking: No report (Simon out today)
- PID: Nearly ready to check things in, but hesitant to without 
sufficient documentation. Probably won't happen until after collaboration
- Calorimetery: David is ready to make the BCAL time spectrum method the 
default and will do so soon.