SasView Code Camp-II
(Last edited: 06-Apr-2014)
Introduction
Code Camp-II was held at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), UK, home to ISIS & the Diamond Light Source. The Camp ran from the morning of Monday 31 March until lunchtime on Sunday 6 April 2014 with a 'meet-and-greet' over dinner on the evening of Sunday 30 March.
The local arrangements were kindly made by Steve King (ISIS) with details on the planning page
Purpose of the Code Camp
The high level objectives of the Code Camp were:
- To learn about the SasView development environment
- To progress and complete tickets in an encouraging and nurturing expert environment
- To shape the future development of SasView
In addition, on the first day, a series of specific objectives were set:
- Address admin issues (Such as build server configuration, ensuring the right people have access to UTK server etc)
- Work on large key tasks (integration of bumps, restructuring of documentation, compatibility with wx 3.0, refactoring of C models)
- Address all tickets needed for Release and have the code in a release build state.
- Address tasks that participants have brought (requests from home institution and personal pet projects)
- Address tickets on the wish list as time/skill/interest allow
Participants
- Paul Butler (NIST)
- Paul Kienzle (NIST)
- Jeff Krzywon (NIST)
- Mathieu Doucet (SNS)
- Andrew Jackson (ESS)
- Torben Nielsen (ESS)
- Miguel Gonzalez (ILL)
- Tobias Richter (DLS)
- Richard Heenan (ISIS)
- Steve King (ISIS)
- Peter Parker (ISIS)
Photos
Photos from the code camp can be found at: https://flic.kr/s/aHsjWgHg7G
Progress/Outcomes
There were over 100 commits to the SasView code repository, and over 50 tickets were addressed, created or updated during the week.
A survey of which versions of packages were being used was made (ticket #213) and a table of results is available in pdf. Excellent progress was made on migrating to wx 3.0 (ticket #216) but was deemed too large a change to risk on a relase anticipated by the end of the month and so will be actually implemented once the release is made. Likewise, the change to the repository structure to remove the last vestiges of the name *sans* and make the code layout in the development environment more closely match that in the deployed environement (ticket #218) was ready to push but deemed to risky so close to a release. It too will be done after this release. Finally the project to replace the optimizer (ticket #214) is mostly complete but again is viewed as too risky to deploy for this release.
Aside from these, work covering a lot of ground was done during the code camp, including a new release of Refl1D. Much of this is documented to some extent in the commits made this week and in the tickets below.
Importantly, several new developers (Torben Nielsen (ESS), Tobias Richter (Diamond) and Richard Heenan (ISIS)) were introduced to the code and have begun to make contributions. The existing developers made good use of the week to make progress on existing tasks and to address new ones.
There was discussion of the direction that SasView should head in, with a presentation from Mathieu Doucet of his web-based data reduction using Mantid. He proposed a similar approach for SasView and it was agreed that he and Torben would work on some technology demonstrations using the existing SasView code as a backend in order to allow the larger group to make a decision later this year on the way forward. A number of the long-term changes planned for SasView (for example using Bumps as the fitting engine, re-working the data structures to include constraints information, and changing the way that models are interfaced) are also required to enable the development of a web-based system with access to a HPC backend.
The general conclusion was that all participants had had a fruitful week and look forward to the next Code Camp. It has been suggested that we might increase the frequency to every 6 months, but we should at least plan to meet next spring.
Tickets Created and Addressed During the Code Camp
Milestone: SasView 3.0.0 (13 matches)
