J.Apostolakis, 19 June 2003
Decisions on release plan:
- Release 5.1 will take place at the end of April 2003, and will be a minor release.
* The major development is cuts per region.
* Interfaces existing in Release 5.0 must be respected.
* Users who have implemented their own EM physics processes will be notified that they must review their process implementation in order to ensure that it will co-work with cuts per region.
- Release 5.2 will take place at the end of June 2003, and will be a minor release.
* A key focus will be improving robustness and computing performance for large productions.
* Migration to direct use of "std::" in place of "g4std" will take place for this release.
Regarding examining and improving computing performance, it was agreed to form a small project team to jointly identify and investigate current hot-spots that are experienced by partners. The team will include expert users and the relevant Geant4 experts (see action item 3).
- Release 6.0 will take place in December 2003, and will be a major release.
Collaboration Agreement proposal
The TSB discussed the draft Collaboration Agreement proposal, and feedback regarding this draft was provided to the CA editors group. The CA editors were mandated to revise the proposal, taking into account the feedback as best possible, and to submit this revised proposal to the TSB and subsequently the CB by April 15th.
It was agreed that a team representing, to the extent possible, the TSB, and in particular developers, will meet with CB representatives, representing institutions contributing resources and experiments, to draft a revised proposal for a future Geant4 Collaboration Agreement. The resulting CA proposal is to be circulated to the TSB.
Platforms for 2003
Support for non-ISO compilers will be dropped from Release 5.2, in June 2003 (as per the decision of TSB meeting, November 2002). Thus the egcs compilers will no longer be supported starting with this release.
It was agreed to launch a second iteration of the platform survery for 2003, in order to provide an updated status report of the OS/compiler combinations in use and required by end-2003 (see action items 6 & 7).
New Action items:
1. [ Several WG coordinators] : publish the WG work-plan for 2003.
2. [ Gabriele Cosmo ] : Update release procedures to document that minor releases *may* include changes of interfaces internal to Geant4 -- requiring that users who have created their own processes must review and potentially modify their implementations. (Appropriate documentation must be made available to assist these actions.)
3. [ John Apostolakis ] : Create a project to review the performance of Geant4 for large detector simulation, including contact and technical persons from experiments with current requirements on performance and the relevant Geant4 experts.
4. [ John Apostolakis/Katsuya Amako/CA-editors ] Circulate revised proposal for Collaboration agreement to TSB and CB by April 15th.
5. [ John Apostolakis ] : Form a delegation with a mandate to represent TSB / developers at meeting with CB representatives regarding the Geant4 Collaboration Agreement.
6. [ Gunter Folger ] : Perform a 'full' survey of platforms and compilers in use mid-2003 and projected for end-2003 in partners.
7. [ Representatives of laboratories/experiments/institutions ] : Provide information on currently used platforms, and those planned for end-2003. Note that a partners requiring support for 'fringe'/unpopular platforms will be expected to contribute to this support (or undertake it as a contribution, if they are the sole requester.)