HEP Software Foundation Startup Team Meeting notes May 11 2015
Agenda
- Activities, working group updates
- AoB
Present: Torre, Dario, Graeme, Michel, Richard, Liz, Pere, Benedikt
Apologies: Daniel, Andrew
Packaging
- Benedikt: met with Liz last week. Concluded it may be useful to ask for white papers. Not at scale as HSF before, but people writing down their thoughts. Then come to a common denominator view.
- Torre: back to talking and not doing? Is this well justified? Where does this come from?
- Benedikt: needed to get Fermilab, Brett, others on board.
- Pere: better to get something done and get reaction to it.
- Torre: hard not to take a cynical view of this. Certainly others will. “HSF is a talk shop.”
- Benedikt: yes, this is why we tried in the first place to make a quick start with repos etc.
- Torre: yes that seemed a good approach.
- Benedikt: several share a common view, many from CERN. Others are asking for a re-think.
- Torre, Pere: please reconsider the re-think.
- Liz: white papers are already written. One for Dune from last fall. A FNAL one also from last fall. Trying to get them shared among us.
- Torre: need to be careful how we describe this then. Not going back to drawing board for another round of white papers.
- Pere: if we can’t agree on things, it isn’t guaranteed that this revisiting process will solve that. Just doing something and getting reaction to it can be the best start.
- Benedikt: maybe limit the process to a quick one page taxonomy.
- Liz: concern from Fermilab management that things are being imposed without not enough input. Doing this round in as short as possible time is the most important metric. Group will meet next week, hear what statements come out, we will get a feel for how much collaboration we have.
Software Projects
- Pere: have a guinea pig project from AIDA to test the guidelines. Proving useful to improve the guidelines.
Training
- Dario: circulated a white paper today, emphasizing it is time to act. Publish existing material, creating index/knowledge base. Went around the web and came to the conclusions found in the paper. Not much available especially for C++, at least for our purposes, bridging from university courses to our coding. Looked at Yelp idea, a long way to go. Need more volunteers. Best to start with something concrete. Post what’s available. Put material on WikiFM since the platform is there and help is available to use it. Focus is on the material, not the platform. Try to get some momentum behind really doing something. Dario is volunteering to contribute C++ course material based on courses he gives, will add it over next few days.
- Torre: great, sounds like a good approach to me.
- Graeme: agree, looks nice, will try to give feedback over next couple of days.
- Dario: suggest the training WG start meeting regularly soon.
- Graeme: agree, in 2 weeks or so? With some material for people to look at and mull over. Circa end May.
- Dario: OK will start gathering material on WikiFM.
- Dario: also, WikiFM has built-in coding/compiling/running for C++ integrated in the platform, nice for interactive real time training.
Knowledge Base
- Torre: reviewed the drupal schema, can see how to extract info if/when we are ready to do so.
- Pere: scalability concern, when entering software, full list of packages is presented (twice). Will grow linearly.
- Torre: agree, could be improved (e.g. by using command completion) with customization work… hard to motivate for a little-used system… Catch 22 again.
Technical notes
Forums
- Gave Julius the green light to go ahead with the social media setup he’s been doing, and he agreed to have a look at twitter/drupal integration to allow website members to post to a common twitter feed.
Licences
AoB