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

[Mark Ito]

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