[Rivet] compatibility issues between 2.2.0 and 2.X.X

[Andy Buckley]

On 29/10/15 14:05, Niccolo' Moretti wrote:
> Hi Andy,
>
> Thank you for your reply.
>
> The first 2 things that come into my mind are the deprecation of
>
> jetproj.jetsByPt(pt,MAXDOUBLE,etmin,etmax,PSEUDORAPIDITY);

I'm not quite sure when we removed that -- apologies if it wasn't 
clearly deprecated before. We brought the Cuts system in in 2.2.0 and it 
was intended to be a complete replacement for all these confusing 
numeric signatures.

I'm pretty sure that none of the hundreds of standard analyses were 
using this full 5-double signature, hence we didn't maintain the 
temporary backward compatibility for as long as we have done with some 
other e.g. projection constructor signatures.

> and the removal of the '#' from yodas (ie, from '# BEGIN HISTO' to
> 'BEGIN HISTO').

This was not intended to be a "visible" change -- the last several 
versions of YODA are able to read the format with or without leading # 
signs. So an upgrade to the latest YODA should fix that issue for you, 
and for further iterations of the YODA format we now have a way to 
maintain backward compatibility with old files.

Andy


> On 29/10/15 14:44, Andy Buckley wrote:
>> Hi Niccolo,
>>
>> Can you be specific about the deprecations that caused problems? We
>> typically try to only add functionality and explicitly mark features
>> as deprecated for some time before removing them in major revisions.
>> So it sounds like we have carelessly broken something between those
>> minor versions, probably because the bundled set of 300+ analyses kept
>> on working.
>>
>> As of 2.3 and 2.4 we are trying to reflect more accurately in the
>> version numbering whether there have been any significant additions to
>> the interface, and to flag and deprecate very explicitly when the
>> preferred ways of doing something change.
>>
>> Apologies for the inconvenience,
>> Andy
>>
>>
>> On 29/10/15 09:51, Niccolo' Moretti wrote:
>>> To rivet authors,
>>>
>>> I would like to complain about all the recent modifications/deprecations
>>> occurred in Rivet in the last few updates.
>>>
>>> Together with other physicists in other universities and institutions,
>>> I'm in charge of a study on the effects of different MC generators on
>>> particular processes.
>>> One of the most important thing is therefore to set up an
>>> universal,common environment to compare the results. Some months ago we
>>> decided to use Rivet as a validation framework because of its simplicity
>>> and flexibility.
>>>
>>> Now all of us are in a situation where the analysis source code and the
>>> output result depend on the used rivet version(and plugins therein). All
>>> the modifications and deprecations have been done without any
>>> retro-compatibility function, forcing us to do different outputs and
>>> codes according to the version, losing in this way the universality that
>>> we have been looked for.
>>>
>>> Moreover, it's not  possible that such modifications, in some cases,
>>> have occurred between to contiguous versions, say 2.2.0 and 2.2.1.
>>>
>>> You should know how it's difficult to set up a common environment among
>>> different universities, institutions, fields (theory and experiments),
>>> computer architectures and people, and of course, how it's difficult to
>>> reinstall or updates software in large clusters.
>>>
>>> I hope that in the future all the deprecations will not be done
>>> instantaneously.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Niccolo' Moretti
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Rivet mailing list
>>> Rivet at projects.hepforge.org
>>> https://www.hepforge.org/lists/listinfo/rivet
>>
>>
>


-- 
Dr Andy Buckley, Lecturer / Royal Society University Research Fellow
Particle Physics Expt Group, University of Glasgow