By telephone: Makoto Asai, Gabriele Cosmo (afternoon only), Satoshi Tanaka, Hajime Yoshida
Apologies for absence: Carlo Dallapiccola, Sergey Kotelnikov, Yohei Morita
By invitation: Gunter Folger, Laszlo Urban
Requests from Working Groups
- Geometry asked Tracking to provide the capability to add a parameter to be printed at each step.
- It was requested that there should be an example of event biasing.
- Geometry requested visualization of polygons and the geometry hierarchy (Dtree).
- Documentation requested more manpower.
Software Management
We expect to update PhysicalConstants and SystemOfUnits to the corresponding CLHEP ones and to migrate to the use of CLHEP RandGeneral, with the next CLHEP release (foreseen around end of February). Maria Grazia Pia requested an extension of the functionality of RandGeneral to provide continuous distributions for use in physics; Gabriele Cosmo will convey this to the original authors.The need to define a policy in order to synchronise CLHEP and Geant4 releases was mentioned, as well as the wish of an easier way of distributing CLHEP, such as a tar file from the Web.
It was decided to put XVT support on hold and thus not to devote resources to it.
It was requested that developers reduce the size of some big source files, for instance those with very long methods, since the compiler does not know how to optimize them.
Documentation
The first official version of documentation is available on the web; various working groups mentioned their plans to extend or update it. Tools to improve the navigation through documentation, examples and code were discussed.MoU matters
A recommendation will be conveyed to the Collaboration Board, concerning Gunter Folger taking the role of Software Management Group Coordinator; Gabriele Cosmo will retain his position in the TSB as SLAC representative and Release Manager.Manuel Delfino will replace Juergen May as CERN CB representative.
Peter Gumplinger will ask the CB to include three more TRIUMF collaborators already involved in Geant4.
Hans-Peter Wellisch observed that some key authors in the hadronic category appear in other Working Groups; he proposed relaxing the rule of unique working group affiliation and letting people appear in more than one Working Group, if appropriate.
It is desirable that the CB should examine applications for new admissions more frequently than twice a year, at least in simple cases such as, for instance, the admission of a student of a current collaborator.
It was proposed to rename the Processes and Materials Working Group to Generic Processes and Materials, better to characterize its actual scope.
A proposal will be circulated by email by John Allison, to rename the Detector Response Working Group to Detector Response and Persistency, or to create a separate Persistency Working Group.
It was clarified that:
- User and Category Interface includes the intercoms category;
- the Track category goes with Particles;
- the Software Management Working Group includes the global category and STL related issues.
On the question of support to users, the Chairman noted in clarification that the experiments, labs and institutions contributing to the Collaboration benefit from this automatically by virtue of having signed the MoU. There is no intent to obstruct the use of Geant4 by others but the speed with which their questions can be answered may be limited by the amount of effort available to the Collaboration and requests for new features will be subject to Collaboration approval. The CERN representative added that, since Geant4 belongs to the Collaboration and not to CERN, CERN's signature of the MoU clearly cannot be taken as conferring membership on all the physics institutes in the Member States.
Introduction of Granular Libraries
Migration to granular libraries should take place as soon as possible. John Allison proposed the creation of a working team (John Allison, John Apostolakis, Frank Behner, Gabriele Cosmo, Hisaya Kurashige, Hans-Peter Wellisch); the tasks are making sure Geant4 can be built from granular libraries, disentangling dependencies and evaluating what is needed for users. A solution was requested for the next TSB meeting.Migration to STL
It was agreed to proceed through an intermediate migration interface; then once a working Geant4 version with STL is available, development will continue with STL only. The time when development is required with STL only will be defined by the TSB and will be communicated to developers.Most of the work of building a migration interface has been done by Stefano Magni as a feasibility study and is available in the current R&D release; the interface for two classes is missing only. Another person to complete the work is needed soon. A working team was proposed by John Allison, including himself, Frank Behner, Gabriele Cosmo and Stefano Magni; the deadline for a short term solution is the next TSB meeting.
Data Policy
Currently there are three ways to handle data:- distribution of separate tar files;
- CVS in geant4/data
- static arrays in source code
Issue of Patches
It was agreed to continue distributing corrections as patches.Testing and Release Strategy
Makoto Asai will submit a written proposal concerning quality assurance, dealing with issues like memory leaks.It was agreed to have a 6-week deadline for the next release; the deadline will be the same for all categories. Deadlines for the following release will be discussed at the next meeting.
It is recommended that before tagging each category runs at least a full application involving use of that category, on at least one platform.
Date and Content of Next Release
It was agreed to issue release 4.0.1 in May; the target is consolidation, bug fixes and time performance improvement.As May (with a prior 6-week deadline for code delivery) is not realistic for the work planned in the Hadronic Working Group, Maria Grazia Pia and Hans-Peter Wellisch requested a release at the end of July; it is agreed that this will be release 4.1.0. It was also requested that a deadline for code delivery of the hadronic category for this release be of 2 weeks (or less) prior to the release deadline: this request takes into account the needs related to a thorough unit and physics testing of the hadronic models included, to ensure their correctness and robustness.
Categories planning to put new features into the July release are asked to communicate their intentions by the next TSB meeting.
New Collaborators
A proposal of a Dubna group to join Geant4 was discussed.Workshop at ESTEC, Amsterdam
It was agreed to hold it the week beginning 20th September.SPIDER
They are working at requirements for Software Release Tools for experiments and asked the Geant4 Collaboration to consider whether Geant4 would be interested in using them. The TSB agreed that Geant4 will watch the developments.Miscellaneous decisions
It was decided that the Tracking and Electromagnetic Working Groups will work at further performance improvements in tracking and some electromagnetic processes.Makoto Asai agreed to maintain the examples and to organize the related working team.
A proposal to have public check out access to the CVS repository was not accepted; both CVS check in and out are restricted to Collaboration members.
The guidelines of the syntax of command guidance will be issued shortly; requests to modify commands will be sent to working group coordinators.
Maria Grazia Pia, 18 February 1999