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VDT Working Group Meeting Minutes
12-Aug-2004, 11:00am

Attendees

• Carey Kireyev (UW Madison)
• Nate Mueller (UW Madison)
• Alain Roy (UW Madison)
• Scott Koranda (UW Milwaukee)
• Bockjoo Kim (Flordia)
• Ed May (Argonne)

Notes

LIGO and VDT
Recently a effort has been started among LIGO participant to create their own distributions of grid software. These will use Debian, Fedora and MacOS native formats (deb, yum and ??? respectively) instead of the VDT distribution (pacman). The main reasons are as follows:

1. VDT Currently doesn't offer explicit support for Debian Linux
2. VDT uses pacman instead of the Debian native packaging format
3. The LIGO participants already use other collaboration-specific tools which they plan to distribute in the native Debian (and Fedora) format.

LIGO as a whole may still use VDT in the following ways:

• Server-side installations will be based on VDT
• Client-side installations for Solaris will be VDT-based
• Some inidividual components will be taken from VDT and re-packaged using abovementioned native packaging formats

VDT will work to figure out the feasibility of support for Debian Linux.
VDT will also continue discussion with LIGO to determine whether there's a way for LIGO to use VDT in ways other than proposed here.

Input on VDT Release Policy
VDT has asked attendants to share their thoughts on VDT release policy, particularly issues such as:

The frequency of releases

The degree of change in software that incremental stable releases may contain

The amount of testing that is desired from a stable release

Ed May:

Agrees that incremental version of stable releases should only include bug fixes. No new components and/or features should be added

Ed also notes that lots of clients install Condor separately from VDT.

Ed recommends site verification script (site_verify) to be used on grid sides to help determine "worthiness" of a VDT release. Potentially the script should also make it into VDT.

Bockjoo Kim:

Grid3 doesn't follow VDT release schedule, so there's not as much of a pressure to coordinate VDT releases with Grid3 needs.

As a rule of thumb the following schedules were proposed:

development releases - once every two months

stable releases - once every six months

VDT also will ask for input from heads of important grid projects: Grid3, LIGO, EGEE, LCG, etc.

VDT Testing

VDT has also discussed augmenting its testing procedures in the following ways:

• Include more component tests (e.g. VDS, MonaLisa) into VDT test harness / nightly installation tests
• Run Nate's "hello, grid" batch test every night
• Discuss the possibility of deploying the latest stable VDT release candidate on UW Globus submit machines (north.cs.wisc.edu and/or south.cs.wisc.edu)