Re: [Fwd: Re: Wikipedia criticism about root]

> I'm glad that bug fixes are being fed back into ROOT rather than fixed
> "locally" on a per-user or per-experiment basis. At least I hope that's
> what's happening! :) There are certain "bugs", however, like the class
> design, UI etc. that cannot be fixed by outside parties: those will
> require a design and development effort, at least by the core team who
> (by definition) do have the time to work on it.

Things are unfortunately more complex than that. In some cases, Root doesn't do what experiments need - their philosophies are just different. In those cases, experiments can't really expect much help from Root core team. One example is the persistency: the persistency architecture of Atlas is based on transient-persistent separation. Data in files are not the same as transient objects. This should help to make both persistent and transient view more manageable and to allow for easier schema evolution. But this is not at all how Root works - Root files are just a direct dump of transient objects and its "schema evolution capabilities" are very limited. So to implement Atlas architecture, we are going against Root philosophy - which is certainly not easy.
[The funny detail is that LCG Persistency Blueprint document requires persistent-transient separation too ... and the choice of Root persistency was based on that document, while Root doesn't satisfy it.] This is certainly related to the incredible fact that Root file format is completely undocumented and experiments have no control at all about its evolution. (Compare that with HDF5 :-)

            Julius

-- 
May God bless and keep the Tsar... far away from us.
- (Fiddler on the Roof)
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