Hi Rene, Rene Brun wrote: > > We are maintaining binaries to simplify the export procedure. I don't understand. Wouldn't it be even more simple to export only source code? You would, of course, still want to insure that ROOT passes a comprehensive testsuite on those platforms on which ROOT is known to work before making a public release. However, actually maintaining binary versions for all platforms on which ROOT is known to work seems like a nightmare. I understand that you have users who actually need for you to provide them with a binary ROOT distribution (e.g. Windows users and specific collaborations), but it seems that there might be tremendous value in emphasizing to everyone else that ROOT is primarily distributed in source form, and that it is the recommended way of downloading and installing ROOT. Once the ROOT CVS repository is in place, you could then perhaps ask the community for volunteers, one for each supported platform, who would be responsible for sending the ROOT team testsuite results just before releases. Distributing responsibilities such as these out into the community might dramatically whittle down the time that the ROOT Team spends on platforms which aren't their primary development platforms. The CVS repository would probably also encourage more frequent bug reports for those users who track, or even use, the development branch of the repository. > Just to give an idea: in the past two years we had more than 40000 > downloads of the binaries compared to 8000 for the source. We know > that we have to improve the makefile mechanism. This is becoming > pretty complex, in particular with the many dialects of Linux, > compiler versions, glibc, etc. I was hoping more stability in this > area. I would offer again that GNU Autoconf, Automake and Libtool solve *all* of ROOT's configuration and portability problems. These packages are well tested and have active maintainers (one of which is even a member of roottalk). This work was already done for ROOT once, and could be easily integrated into the current version of ROOT. The only disadvantage is that build times are about 80% longer. This seems like such a small price to ask ROOT end-users (note that I did not say ROOT developers) to pay in order to have a highly portable ROOT which builds identically on all platforms, from Unix to Windows to .... ROOT developers (e.g. the ROOT Team) would not have to pay this 80% price in build times (unless they just wanted to). Only end-users would have slightly longer build times, but they only have to build ROOT once, not several times like developers do. > Concerning CVS, Fons has nearly finished the procedure to > create/maintain the ROOT CVS site. He will make an announcement once > this is ready. It is good to hear that Fons has nearly finished the conversion to CVS. Perhaps it would be a good idea to announce to roottalk the design of the CVS repository in order to get feedback from other CVS users before it is completed. Fons may appreciate the collective wisdom available from the community, as I know that there are several long-time CVS users who subscribe to roottalk. There might be some real gems of wisdom out there. -- Matthew D. Langston SLD, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center langston@SLAC.Stanford.EDU
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