Stakeholder meeting notes – 2015/03/19

by Kyle Knoepfel
Attendees:

David Adams, Martin Frank, Patrick Gartung, Tom Junk, Brendan Kiburg, Rob Kutschke, Adam Lyon, Gianluca Petrillo, Brian Rebel, Erica Snider

artists: Lynn Garren, Chris Green, Kyle Knoepfel, Jim Kowalkowski, Marc Paterno

Agenda:

Still aiming for May 1 for next release.

Adam asked when Geant v4.10.1 would be available. Lynn said we’re still waiting for a patch.

cetbuildtools improvements

Chris mentioned that the artists had no idea that the cmake stage in higher-level packages was taking so long. This was not a problem that the artists had observed in art, and was not intended to be acceptable. Chris and Lynn came up with a couple mitigations, one of which was easy to put into cetbuildtools code. One or two other improvements could be made, but those will only be seen whenever you start building packages that include the new cetbuildtools improvements. Most of the time is now running the compiler, not cmake.

The new version of cetbuildtools also features a technology preview: cmake is now capable of producing build instructions for generators other than “make”, through the incantation:

buildtool – -generator = ( make | ninja ) # ‘make’ is default

Ninja’s benefit is that it takes very little time to determine if only a few files need building. If everything needs to be built, though, ninja doesn’t give you much improvement.

Ninja system has been packaged up and binary packages and source code are included on scisoft.fnal.gov/scisoft/packages/ninja/.

The artists are interested in soliciting feedback as to whether this is interesting enough to retain and perhaps make as the default compilation option.

Miscellaneous:

Patrick reports progress being made building art on Ubuntu 14.