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

[Dan Higgins]

Zhijie - thanks for the explanation

Everyone - there have been several problems lately with empty 
directories. People have removed old code, but the empty directories 
stay in CVS (a property of CVS that we cannot change, as far as I know). 
This is particularly a problem inside the src/actor directory from which 
the KAR files are built. We have to remove the empty directories there 
to build the kar files. So, you need to checkout from CVS using the -P 
switch. If you need a directory, please put a short explanatory file in 
it, as described by Zhijie! (Or dynamically create the directory in your 
code.)

Dan

Zhijie Guan wrote:

>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
>>    
>>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Kepler-dev mailing list
>Kepler-dev at ecoinformatics.org
>http://mercury.nceas.ucsb.edu/ecoinformatics/mailman/listinfo/kepler-dev
>  
>


-- 
*******************************************************************
Dan Higgins                                  higgins at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Ph: 805-893-5127
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) Marine Science Building - Room 3405
Santa Barbara, CA 93195
*******************************************************************