[Halld-offline] Deprecating DIST in favor of HALLD_VERSIONS for version.xml files

[Mark Ito]

Folks,

I will delete the version.xml files in $DIST Monday morning, first 
thing. Recall that the complete set is in $HALLD_VERSIONS.

   -- Mark

P.S. Recall:

  * DIST = /group/halld/www/halldweb/html/dist
  * HALLD_VERSIONS = /group/halld/www/halldweb/html/halld_versions

On 2/28/20 1:58 PM, Mark Ito wrote:
> Folks,
>
> February 24th has come and gone. And yet the version.xml files in 
> $DIST remain. And in fact I have decided on a less extreme deprecation 
> strategy:
>
> Rather than delete the version.xml files in DIST, they will be 
> retained as they are until May 1. No new files will be added. New 
> files will only appear in HALLD_VERSIONS.
>
> One exception: the next time a new default version set is assigned, 
> the link in DIST pointing to the new default will be deleted. The old 
> link in DIST, if retained, would point to the old default and not the 
> new. To retain that link would be confusing. So it gets deleted. The 
> correct link will only appear in HALLD_VERSIONS.
>
> The version.xml files in DIST will be deleted on May 1.
>
> This means that anything working now with currently existing files, 
> other than procedures using the link to the default version set, will 
> continue to work from DIST until May 1. Anything that uses version 
> sets produced after today will need to use HALLD_VERSIONS.
>
> Finally, note that there are other files in DIST, files other than the 
> version.xml files. This change has no effect on the status of those 
> other files.
>
> Let me know if you have questions on this.
>
>   -- Mark
>
> On 2/7/20 3:21 PM, Mark Ito wrote:
>> Folks,
>>
>> Executive Summary:
>>
>> version.xml files currently stored in $DIST will disappear. They can 
>> be found in $HALLD_VERSIONS going forward. The change will occur on 
>> Monday, February 24.
>>
>> The Details:
>>
>> As you know we have built up a large collection of version set files 
>> a.k.a. version.xml files. Since these first started getting created 
>> they have been stored in the DIST directory,
>>
>>   /group/halld/www/halldweb/html/dist ,
>>
>> which is web-accessible and therefore a convenient storage and 
>> retrieval directory for single file access. Some time ago however, I 
>> started storing our "official" version set files in its own Git 
>> repository, which is cloned in a separate web-accessible directory at 
>> JLab, HALLD_VERSIONS
>>
>>   /group/halld/www/halldweb/html/halld_versions .
>>
>> The main motivation was to provide an easy way to distribute the 
>> entire collections of files to non-JLab sites (i.e., using git clone) 
>> and update those directories (i.e., using git pull). This mechanism 
>> is used by the gluex_install scripts.
>>
>> The XML files in DIST have been maintained as an exact mirror of the 
>> contents of HALLD_VERSION by me, by hand, for many months now. So 
>> this message is to tell you guys I'm going to stop doing that.
>>
>> Version set files in DIST will disappear on Monday, February 24.
>>
>> Right now, both environment variables DIST and HALLD_VERSIONS are 
>> defined by the standard BuildScripts environment set-up (in 
>> gluex_env_boot_jlab.(c)sh). After February 24, only HALLD_VERSIONS 
>> will be defined.
>>
>> Let me know if you have comments, questions, or objections related to 
>> this process.
>>
>>   -- Mark
>>
> _______________________________________________
> Halld-offline mailing list
> Halld-offline at jlab.org
> https://mailman.jlab.org/mailman/listinfo/halld-offline
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.jlab.org/pipermail/halld-offline/attachments/20200821/20b0e508/attachment.html>