Attendance
In person: John Allison (chairman), Katsuya Amako, John Apostolakis, Frank Behner, Gabriele Cosmo, Gunter Folger, Peter Gumplinger, Hisaya Kurashige, Michel Maire, Youhei Morita, Maria Grazia Pia, Florence Ranjard, Takashi Sasaki, Satoshi Tanaka, Peter Truscott, Hans-Peter Wellisch, Hajime Yoshida
By video: Marc Verderi
By telephone:
Minutes
The minutes of the TSB meeting on 10 June 1999 were approved.The minutes of the "post-mortem" meeting on 29 July were approved.
The minutes of the TSB meeting on 6 September 1999 were approved.
Management matters
As requested by the Collaboration Board, a set of candidates for the selection of the TSB Chairman was indicated.MoU management
In a previous TSB meeting it had been agreed that the actual MoU document should not be changed, but modifications should be handled as addenda. John Allison volunteered to bring this issue to the attention of the CB on 27/9, since it was not clear to him how to do this in practice.Copyright
Hans-Peter Wellisch noticed that RD44 still appears in many Geant4 header files as the owner of the intellectual property of the code; it was agreed to change RD44 to Geant4.Frank Behner asked whether Geant4 is under the GNU Project licence.
Maria Grazia Pia mentioned the possibility of the use of Geant4 by companies, as in a case discussed in the summer at a meeting with an ESA contractor, involving an Italian company.
It was decided to bring these last two issues to the attention of the CB.
STL
A staged solution for the migration to STL was recommended, removing the Rogue Wave references first, then performing a full migration to STL. There was a consensus that the full migration would be a long job - a rough preliminary estimate of the timescale was of the order of one year. It was agreed that the category coordinators would present at the next TSB a preliminary evaluation of the time required in their category for the migration and some milestone plans.Frank Behner agreed to provide a small STL tutorial to the Collaboration; due to other commitments, he planned to have it ready by the end of November, but he would do his best to finish it earlier.
It was suggested to get rid of HashMap and replace it with standard STL containers; isome people found desirable to have this done by the first half of 2000; some other people found desirable to have this done as soon as possible. It was decided to review this issue at the next TSB meeting.
Migration to ISO C++
According to what was discussed at the G4 Workshop in the Software Management session, and as requested by LHCB, the migration to ISO-ANSI C++ was approved. As the migration will imply a significant overhead for people who will have to actually implement it, it was decided to do it, but it was agreed that considerable resources will be put in by other sources, as Gabriele Cosmo has other commitments and cannot take the whole workload for this operation. It was agreed that the team of people participating in this task would perform a preliminary risk analysis of the project and present results by the 15th October. As for the strategy to adopt and when the migration should happen, this will be decided at the next TSB meeting. The team will take care of notifying the collaborators in advance of the operations to be done on their code. It was agreed that for some time both an ISO-compliant version and a non-ISO-compliant one will be supported.New members
G. Pieri (IGD) has left the Collaboration, as he has got a job in industry. Two new IGD Collaborators were admitted: Valter Rolando (Geometry) and Ada Solano (Electromagnetic Physics).N. Salkov will join the Lebedev group, to work on Hadronic Physics.
IN2P3 will apply to join the Collaboration, replacing the Ecole Polytechnique; French Collaborators will move to IN2P3 affiliation.
It was decided to recommend the admission of a Jefferson Lab group, to work on Hadronic Physics (photonuclear interactions).
It was decided to recommend the admission of a group from the Theoretical Physics Institute of the Frankfurt University, to work on Hadronic Physics.
Vladimir Ivantchenko (Novosibirsk), already actively involved in Geant4 development, applied to join the Collaboration in the Common group.
Next release
It was agreed that category coordinators will provide a statement of new features that they would like to have in the next release. Hans-Peter Wellisch mentioned several physics processes that were ready. A provisional timescale was defined, to be reviewed at the next TSB meeting.Any other business
Takashi Sasaki asked the meeting to confirm that code should not be committed without the approval of the category coordinator of the pertinent category. This was confirmed as Geant4 policy.
Maria Grazia Pia, 24 October 1999
Meeting Date