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

[Mark Ito]

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
>