HEP Software Foundation Startup Team Meeting notes Sep 25 2015

Present: Torre, Pere, Benedikt, Frank, Michel, Liz

Apologies: Dario, Peter, Andrea

Indico Agenda

General updates

Pere - general interest in machine learning in HEP, getting organized with forum, workshops etc. Came up a lot at the ROOT workshop. It is getting some momentum. Add to TMVA package etc.

Made today a pointer on our HSF website to this forum. Will add to it as new things appear. Should be visible through the HSF.

Torre - pinged our next-gen Frontier conditions DB folks in ATLAS (working with CMS) on exposing it more widely via HSF.

Packaging

Liz - should have by Monday or so a mailing on where packaging is at, for input and comment, go from there.

Pere - Brett looked at nix package manager?

Liz - looks like there are too many hurdles to overcome, onerous. Was trying to package ROOT in nix.

Benedikt - an email summarizing the findings could be useful.

Liz - will suggest that to him.

Benedikt - restarting discussion on the naming conventions document. Sent a mail a few weeks ago, all quiet, will re-send. Working on project template tools, see Common HSF tools in github.

Liz - how do you handle licensing file in the project template tool?

Benedikt - hsf_create_project has a parameter to include a license file. Currently GPL3 and Apache 2. Can easily adjust. We should have there the licenses we encourage people to use.

Also will show there examples of writing unit tests with gtest. There’s a markdown readme page for each tool explaining what’s in it. It uses the platform naming conventions too. Not circulated yet; would prefer at least a second pair of eyes before propagating even to the tech list, since it is supposed to be offering best practices.

Pere, Frank volunteer to be the further pairs of eyes.

Pere - Has potential to be used for AIDA projects also.

Benedikt - agree, but first target is the HSF project incubator.

Frank - any plan to include packaging/build tools for higher level, larger packages also? Would be useful.

Pere, Benedikt - ROOT has some cmake template material that could be useful to the HSF.

Licensing

Michel - did a round of edits on John’s text to take account of discussion, happy to restart the discussion.

Andrew - did the changes I volunteered for.

Benedikt - there’s a repository in github to hold the document.

Michel - will send a message to get things going again.

Benedikt - how to handle citation requirements of licenses is something to think about.

Technical notes

Andrew - recall that we accepted the technical note policy in discussion, but not officially.

We agree we endorse it.

Andrew will put the TN in the git repository and send to the open HSF forum list.

The github TN repository will be organized to clearly distinguish between finalized documents and in-progress drafts. Document directories should contain sources and templates where possible, at a minimum the pdf of the document.

Also a github directory for TN admin stuff, templates etc.

About five draft TNs are in the works, over and above the TN about TNs.

Software knowledge base and communication

Torre introduced the new (pre-alpha) HEP software knowledge base implementation, based on a ‘data knowledge base’ prototype being applied in other ways as well. Main points:

Once it’s stable (couple weeks?) the drupal sw catalog will be retired and removed from the hepsoftwarefoundation.org site, replaced by links to the new one, which will simplify the HSF site and give it a better focus on HSF-specific content.

SW projects, development tools/services

See packaging discussion re: tools. More on SW projects in the next meeting.

Discussion on next steps, plans for the fall

We stopped at an hour, will discuss this next time hopefully with a larger group.

AOB

A priority is to put together a newsletter soon.

Back to Thursday 5pm meetings starting next week.