Thu May 11 17:18:06 CEST 2006 ============================================ Comments on R4 deliverables and CDR4 notes ============================================ ---001-------------------------------------------------------------------------- (BrianGlendenning) CORBA through firewalls It is not obvious to me that we need to run CORBA through the firewall. As I understand it the only service that is needed is depositing SBs from remote users to the Archive inside the firewall. Given this limited purpose, perhaps a very simple HTTP protocol could be implemented instead, rather than using the JacORB which is noted as being buggy. REPLY OT requirements on ACS for R4 explicitly request the capability to handle CORBA through the firewall. But you might be right and HTTP might be sufficient. In any case, Marcus Shilling, representing both OT and ACS, is responsible to analyse in details what is needed, so that we avoid unnecessary developments. For what concerns JacORB, we plan to upgrade from 1.4 to 2.x, that is allegedly much more stable. We think this is in any case an important activity, because JacORB 1.4 is by now quite old. The final decision should be taken for the ACS 6.0 planning meeting, that I would like to have at the time of the leads meeting in Garching. ---002-------------------------------------------------------------------------- (BrianGlendenning) Optical pointing punch list As I understand the reply, all items have either already been fixed or an SPR has been submitted for the open items, this is enough I think. REPLY Yes, this is the case. ---003-------------------------------------------------------------------------- (GianniRaffi) Cannot find reference to the new CASA framework that will be deployed by Offline. No ACS further req uirements coming from this? Offline lists assumptions etc for ACS. REPLY I am not aware of any requirement from Offline. None was stated in the R4 wiki page and I have not received any request. But I have not read the Offline CDR-4 documentation. Please let me know if I have to look into that or if I have to explicitly ask. ---004-------------------------------------------------------------------------- (JoeSchwarz) Help system for ALMA Note that the handling of images by the OT is currently quite poor: very large PostScript files are used for screenshots (which bloats the OT help files) and they don't even display well! Some way to incorporate the JPEG equivalents should be found. (Marcus is investigating http://www.pdflib.com/products/more/jpeg2 ps.html.) REPLY Thanks for the note of caution. I will discuss this issue with Marcus and probably add some information to the ACS Architecture document. ---005-------------------------------------------------------------------------- ============================================ Comments on Planning Spreadsheet ============================================ ---006-------------------------------------------------------------------------- (GianniRaffi) 21 Restart .. seems important soon REPLY It is already possible to explicitly request a component to shutdown and to restart it manually. But this implies a complete stop and restart of that component. This item would implement an interface to request that a component if re-initialised. This is more that what already implemented, but not so much. Therefore I think this item does not have really high priority. ---007-------------------------------------------------------------------------- (GianniRaffi) 23 Upgrade of OS and basic tools. Do we need to upgrade anything? I would propose to check very care fully, in order to make sure that there are no implications on the RTOS version we use, which we can not afford to change (ideally for a year or more). REPLY I think we really need to upgrade JacORB, because we are using a very old version. This might be rather expensive but I have already allocated the resources. It would probably be also good to upgrade ACE/TAO, because the newer versions have a number of imptovements, but we do not have really pressing issues. For the rest I hope we will be able to keep stable versions. ---008-------------------------------------------------------------------------- (GianniRaffi) 43 Alarm system. To complete this with Control is important. To go to the latest laser much less, un less fundamental problems are found. REPLY Agreed. ---009-------------------------------------------------------------------------- (BrianGlendenning) Should log message structuring (wanted by Exec I believe) be an item? REPLY In this document I have put items that have been already agreed. I will prepare a new version after discussion of the ACS 6.0 planning. This item is already in the list for the ACS 6.0 planning proposal. ---010-------------------------------------------------------------------------- (BrianGlendenning) Should there be work for GUI panels (with or without LabView, ABeans)? I think in this cycle we shou ld work on the technical underpinnings of GUIs, including a sample panel or two. REPLY This also should be discussed at the ACS 6.0 planning. There have been recent discussions aroung this topic and it would be probably good to have a discussion at the leads meeting. I personally think that we should do this work and provide both support for Java GUI building and LabView. ---011-------------------------------------------------------------------------- (BrianGlendenning) Ralph commented in email that the State machine / component lifecycle infrastructure (at least for C ++) needs some work. Should this be a development item? REPLY This is being discussed now and there is still no agreement. For, for the time beeing, I would keep the item out of the planning. Depending on what we will agree, it might become a minor update or major changes. _____oOo_____