October 30, 2008

Attendees: Tom, Elaine, Greg, Eric, Conrad

New Action Items

• UNASSIGNED will write a script to remove cruft from web download tree (item 1)
• Scooter will look into trac response time and email content (item 1)
• Elaine will contact Ranyee to see if SSD requires MinrmsPlot (item 3)

Action Items from previous meetings

• Everyone will review Chimera Library course sessions for updates and/or splitting into multiple sessions
• Scooter will write a Chimera news item announcing work on release 1.3
• Conrad will look into disabling stereo in orthographic view
• Conrad, Eric, Greg and Scooter have tasks for Chimera production release and conversion to svn/trac
  • fix build process to use trunk for daily builds and 1.3 for release candidate
  • build and announce release candidate
  • convert from cvs to svn
  • convert from gnats to trac
  • create account for Wei to access svn/trac
• Al will decommission SGI after the next Chimera production release
• Al will install stereo-capable workstation to replace SGI before decommissioning SGIs
• tef will contact Adobe for more information about embedding 3d graphics in PDF documents

Minutes

1. Previous Action Items
   • Greg is has completed conversion to new version numbering scheme. Version checking CGI script is now compatible with both old and new numbering systems. Work on automatic builds for both daily build (from trunk) and candidate builds (from branch) is still in progress.
   • Conrad suggested that we create a script that removes "cruft" from the download tree. Cruft is defined as any Chimera distribution not listed in the "dist/releases" file in the Chimera source tree.
   • Tom noted that trac has been slow in the past week. Eric mentioned that email from gnats contained a link that takes you directly to the bug report being updated/reported. There is no such link in the email from trac, so it's more work to get to the report. Is it possible to include such a URL in the trac email message?

2. Version numbering system (Greg)
   • While working on the new version numbering system, Greg noted that we may have problems with the next release (1.4). Since we reset the build numbers on branches but not on the trunk, when we actually fork the tree (under CVS) for 1.4, we will have "1.4 build 1" on the branch and "1.4 build XXXX" on the trunk. The version comparison will then think that the trunk is newer than the branch when that is obviously not the case. To solve the problem, we can (a) make branch be version 1.4.1 (> 1.4), or (b) do not reset build numbers. It was then pointed out that all this will change when we switch from cvs to svn. svn provides monotonically increasing "changeset" numbers, so this problem would not arise if we tie build numbers to changeset numbers. As long as we switch to svn before release 1.4, we do not have a problem.

3. Evaluation of features to remove or improve (All)
   • MinrmsPlot
     • Elaine reported that the only person who has used minrms recently is Mark Peterson and he said that it is not a vital tool for him. Elaine also pointed out that SSD may use parts of MinrmsPlot for its GUI. Everyone agreed that if SSD does not use MinrmsPlot, the extension should be moved from the Chimera distribution to the minrms distribution.
   • raytracing
     • This was added to the list by Tom. Everyone agreed that we should identify deficiencies (eg missing hither/yon planes, completely transparent surfaces being visible, image still too dark) and improve the implementation.
   • selector construction panel
     • Solicit feedback for removal.
   • vrml display and anythong that uses it
     • Rather than removing tools _because_ they use VRML (eg bild), everyone agreed that we should replace VRML with a graphics layer that provides greater functionality (eg selectable, graphical attributes like color for subparts of models). Tom points out that this is similar to the surface unification project.
   • keyboard shortcuts
     • Tom added this to the "remove" list because he has not seen anyone else use them. The advantage of removing keyboard shortcuts is that implementors (in particular Tom) will not be tempted to provide a poor/limited user interface via shortcuts; instead, they will need to provide a true command line interface (and GUI). This will make scripting functionality much more complete. Solicit feedback for removal.
   • volume rendering with color maps
     • Already removed by Tom.
   • fourier transforms
   • named volume subregions
   • precomputed volume subsamples
     • Deferred.
   • movie recorder
     • Improve.

4. Statistics collection
   • There was discussion on whether we should collect usage statistics to aid our feature removal decision process. The suggested implementation is to collect statistics on functionality usage (not just extensions) and ask the user whether they are willing to send these in when they are registering Chimera (which they need to redo once a year). [Another suggestion of tying statistics reporting to bug reporting was shot down because of potential skewing of stats due to biased sampling.] No decisions were made.