[Rivet] minutes of special LCG Generator Services monthly meeting - HepMC discussion and release planning

[Andy Buckley]

On 06/04/10 00:00, Lynn Garren wrote:
> The first beta of 2.06 is finally up.  I have only made the source code 
> tarball available initially: 
> http://lcgapp.cern.ch/project/simu/HepMC/download/
> 
> In the unlikely event that there are no changes requested by any of you, 
> I'll build the binaries.

Hi Lynn,

Apologies for taking a long time to report anything... it seems to work
okay for me, but I've not had time to do any thorough testing. A few
comments:

* Are there any tests/examples for the new features like labelled
weights and range iterators? I couldn't find any, and they would be
useful for testing. I didn't dig further than testHepMC.cc, though...
maybe elsewhere?

* I had trouble reading in weights from a HepMC 2.05 ASCII file... is
the HepMC 2.06 code able to handle the old, non-labelled weights? I
think this is probably needed, at least until use of the naming feature
is well-established.

* The new range iterators, for GenVertex as well as GenEvent are defined
in GenEventIterators.h -- it took me some time to realise that the
contents of this file aren't just limited to what the name indicates.
Any chance they could go in the (already existing) IteratorRanges.h
instead -- the name seems to fit, and it currently just contains one
enum declaration, which itself is used by the new range functions.

* Do the weight labels actually propagate to the ASCII file? I tried
generating some events and didn't see any corresponding entry in the
file for empty labels, but maybe it isn't written out if the labels
aren't set?

Cheers, and sorry again to take so long before moaning ;)
Andy

-- 
Dr Andy Buckley
SUPA Advanced Research Fellow
Particle Physics Experiment Group, University of Edinburgh