[kepler-dev] Why I can't work: a plea for stability

[Zhijie Guan]

I agree with Christopher's comments. Especially I support the idea of  
customizing Kepler for not using all of the libraries at startup.

I'd like to explain a little bit more about the PAUPInfer actor since  
I am the author. I checked in that actor yesterday afternoon. When  
being loaded, that actor checks the existence of the directory  
$KEPLER/lib/jar/cipres/dist/help/sampleFiles for initial setup. At  
the first time I checked in that directory as an empty directory  
since that can satisfy the requirements of the PAUPInfer actor. But  
10 minutes later I realized that this empty directory may make  
troubles on build if users update their working directories with "- 
dPA" option. The "-dPA" option prunes any empty directory during  
update, so the PAUPInfer actor reports an error since it cannot find  
its default setting directory. As a workaround, I checked in a sample  
input file in that directory at the second time.

Unfortunately anybody checked out/updated the Kepler between my two  
check-ins would get an error like "cannot find readme.txt in the  
directory ...". Matt reported that error on IRC. I think Christopher  
might update his Kepler during the same time period. The Kepler build  
should be ok now. If Eclipse gets any problem with that PAUPInfer  
actor, please let me know. Sorry for broke the build at least for 10  
minutes.

Next time I will try to check-in my code during the night, when less  
developers check-in/out the CVS repository. In that case I can get  
more time to check if I break the build. Hope that helps.


Zhijie




On Apr 20, 2006, at 12:48 PM, Christopher Brooks wrote:

> I'm not actually upset or anything, but I thought I'd give
> you an outsider's perspective.
>
> I'm one of the worst offenders here, since I know I broke the build
> yesterday which my diva related changes.  I had things working
> in one tree, but was not able to test because of a problem in
> my other tree on another machine.
>
> Basically, I thought on my other tree I had broken something
> and spend several hours tracking down the problem as being that
> some geon actors were removed, but geon.xml was not updated.
> It took more time than necessary because I upgraded Eclipse
> and did a reinstall of ptII and kepler sources so I could
> be sure.  It also took more time because the error message
> was a NullPointerException and I had not seen this sort
> of error before.
>
> Now, I'm facing problems with Eclipse again?
> I'm seeing errors about cipres PAUPInfer class?
>
> It does not build in Eclipse, so I excluded it, and
> then I had to remove some files from actors
> and then trash ~/.kepler and run ant buildkarlib
>
> I eventually did all that stuff and now I was able to work.
>
>
> A couple of comments:
> 1) We all, (me especially) need to be more careful about not breaking
> the build and Kepler in general
>
> 2) Kepler needs to be restructured so that it does not require the
> entire library to be present and working at startup.  Ptolemy II does
> this so as to avoid problems like PAUPInfer.  I don't know what this
> class does, and since I'm not using it, I shouldn't care.  This would
> help start up time.  I think that this might possibly be worth
> considering implementing before 1.0.
>
> 3) The Eclipse instructions are very complex.  We were never able to
> help Sivagowri Swaminathan <sivagowri at hotmail.com> to his or my
> satisfaction.  BTW - Under Eclipse 3.2.0 (rc1), with java 1.5.0_06,
> the svg icons are not visible for me?  Not sure why.
>
> 4) The limitation about being able to run only one Kepler because
> of the database is troubling.  I'm running on a shared Windows
> server.  If I wanted to use Kepler in a class and have students
> run on this server, would I be able to?
>
> Anyway, those are some random thoughts.  As I said, I'm not
> at all upset about these issues, and I really enjoy contributing
> and collaborating with you all.  I think Kepler is pretty slick,
> I like what you've done with Ptolemy and appreciate you putting
> up with Ptolemy's (and my) ideosyncracies.
>
> _Christopher
> _______________________________________________
> Kepler-dev mailing list
> Kepler-dev at ecoinformatics.org
> http://mercury.nceas.ucsb.edu/ecoinformatics/mailman/listinfo/ 
> kepler-dev