Offline meeting minutes

[David Lawrence <davidl@jlab.org>]

Hi All,

    The minutes from Friday's Offline Software meeting are now posted. 
You can find them online at the URL below or copied (even further) below.

Regards,
-David

http://www.jlab.org/Hall-D/software/wiki/index.php/July_18%2C_2008_Software

==Minutes==

Attendees: David L. (chair), Mark I., Alke A., Elton S., Simon T., Beni 
Z., Jim S., Alex S.

EVO: Curtis M.

===Updates on Geometry specified in XML===
Beni gave a summary of some recent changes he's made to the XML-based 
simulation geometry for GlueX (see his figures above). These included:

* Re-routing the FDC cables upstream instead of downstream
* Adding an inner aluminum plate to the BCAL
* Reconfiguring the BCAL for the alternate readout scheme (3x3 for the 
inner section instead of 6x4)
* Rotation of CDC layers wrt one another to break up alignments
* Close packing CDC layers to improve LR resolution and fit more layers 
into the over CDC volume

The BCAL and CDC changes are not all committed to the repository just 
yet. They have been distributed
to the Regina/IU folks and CMU/JLab folks respectively to run M.C. tests 
on first.

Beni has also made a lot of use of the ROOT tools based on the output of 
the hdds-root program. One "gotcha" encountered though is that ROOT will 
plot all volumes even if they exist in such a way that particles tracked 
by GEANT could never enter them. This is due to overlapping volumes or 
daughter values extending outside their parent.

There was also an issue with polygons used to define the FDC cables 
needing to be defined in ascending-z order.

It was noted that some simulations have already been performed by 
Regina/IU with the 4x6 readout geometry and that new ones were being 
planned with the 3x3 geometry. There was a question however as to 
whether the FDC cabling was "visible" to geant in the initial MC study 
of the BCAL so this should be verified before comparisons are made to 
the alternate readout geometry results.



===Coding Conventions===
Mark Ito brought up the topic of coding conventions. He suggested 
re-activating the list we began 2 years ago, but have not worked on 
since. Starter suggestions were:

# All headers should have macros defined to protected from double inclusion
# Standard output should be directed to something we define (dout?) 
rather than cout to allow us to develop filters/handlers later
# Exceptions should be thrown using a standard exception class

There was general agreement on these suggestions being good ones. Some 
follow-up is needed on the output streams and exception issues.

No one was assigned to add these to the wiki.

-- 

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  David Lawrence Ph.D.
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