Minutes of the LIM meeting, Nov 11, 2004

Present: Shahzad Muzaffar (CMS), Emil Obreshkov (ATLAS), Eric Poinsignon (SPI), Andreas Pfeiffer (SPI)

Apologies: David Quarrie (ATLAS), Florence Ranjard (LHCb)

Actions:

- The latest releases of SEAL (1.4.2) and PI (1.2.4) have been build for all platforms including the _dbg version for SLC3 as requested by ATLAS.

- Shahzad and Eric will start the build of the new external packages (for CMS) asap (Friday or early next week).

- Callgrind (and kcachegrind) are installed for SLC3 and are in test by Stefan Roiser.

- The missing libs (and modules) for POOL 1.7.0 on SLC3 have been added by Andreas.

Issues:

Andreas will investigate about the status of the root-4 based versions of the projects and report at the next meeting (or through the mailing list).

Emil reported that building the ATLAS release takes significantly longer on SLC3 and asked if anybody has seen a similar effect. Nobody had. He also reported that shared libs in debug mode are about a factor of two smaller on SLC3 as compared to RH. This might be related to different default compiler settings on the two platforms:

   lxbuild001:seti > cat /etc/redhat-release 
   Scientific Linux CERN release 3.0.3 (SL)
   lxbuild001:seti > g++ -v --help | more
   Reading specs from /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-redhat-linux/3.2.3/specs
   Configured with: ../configure --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man \
       --infodir=/usr/share/info --enable-shared --enable-threads=posix \
       --disable-checking --with-system-zlib --enable-__cxa_atexit \
       --host=i386-redhat-linux
   Thread model: posix
   gcc version 3.2.3 20030502 (Red Hat Linux 3.2.3-42)
   
   lxplus004:pfeiffer > cat /etc/redhat-release 
   Red Hat Linux release 7.3 (Valhalla)
   lxplus004:pfeiffer > g++ -v --help | more
   Reading specs from /usr/local/gcc-alt-3.2.3/lib/gcc-lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.2.3/specs
   Configured with: ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/gcc-alt-3.2.3 --enable-shared
   Thread model: posix
   gcc version 3.2.3

Emil has asked the Linux support team for an explanation. He will circulate their answer to the LIM mailing list.

Andreas reported that there is a major problem on the Mac in conjunction with static objects in shared libs when used through a plugin manager. The plugin manager loads the shared lib of the plugin and the static objects in this lib are properly initialized. Once the plugin then loads another shared lib, the static objects in the new lib are not initialized. This presently causes the SEAL plugin mechanism to fail when asked to load root libs. The resolution of this problem is only expected with the new Mac OS X release 10.4 (Tiger). Thus no planning for releases on Mac can be given, although builds of the projects are done now.

Next meeting: November 25, 11:00.

Action items:

new and outstanding:

- check status of root-4 based releases

- plan for releases on Mac - problem on Mac (see minutes of Nov 11, 2004)

- plan/install external packages for CMS and LHCb - started

closed:

- provide _dbg versions for SLC3 platform - foreseen for the new releases of the projects: seal 1.4.2, pool 1.8.0, pi 1.4.2 and the root-4 based counterparts. -> (11nov2004) closed with the cutting of the mentioned releases.

- PI 1.2.3 for rh73_gcc32 - moved to version 1.2.4 (using seal 1.4.2) -> (11nov2004) done with release 1.2.4

-- Main.pfeiffer - 24 Nov 2004