[Ncep.list.wwatch3.discussion-group] WAVEWATCH III monthly meeting

[Arun Chawla - NOAA Federal]

Hi

First and foremost  a big thank you to Erick and Fabrice for putting
together their presentations. This is really great stuff and we all learn a
lot during these meetings.


Before proceeding any further I am going to get to the nub of the issue.
When we are in the conference call, people please keep your phones on mute
and only unmute the phone when you are talking or asking questions. This is
specially true if you are in an area where you cannot control the noise.
Because of the noise factor from somebody's phone Fabrice's presentation
had to be cut short because we could not hear anything. This is not fair to
Fabrice who has taken time off to prepare the information and be on this
call or to anybody else who is also putting time aside from their busy
schedules to learn more information. This is a unique opportunity for all
of us to learn about what our colleagues are doing without having to resort
to a budget busting conference (which in these tight times is a luxury). To
make this work for all of us please try to keep the phones on mute and only
unmute when you are trying to talk / ask questions. My apologies to Fabrice
for having his talk disrupted.

We will set up a place on the svn trac (which if you have an svn account
you will have access to) where we can keep these presentations. These are
informational only so you cannot use this in your own presentations without
the speaker's consent. Apart from the talks the following topics came up
for discussion

1. Code distribution to outside people. The main way to distribute code is
through the Public Release. For that there are no restrictions as such and
all we ask is that people get registered so we have an idea of who is
getting the code. Nobody is rejected. But to get the latest code, we follow
a more restricted path. This code will be released to a select list of
people as alpha releases. The alpha users will have to follow the
principles of the WAVEWATCH III licence (a one pager on that was sent to
all of you a couple of weeks ago and a copy will also be kept on the trac).
We do not have a hard and fast rule on when alpha releases are made. Here
are the general rules
      i) The alpha release comes from a versioned trunk. Once new features
are added to the trunk, I do a series of regression tests. And if I am
happy with those tests then I give the trunk a new version number.
    ii) When we are ready to create a new alpha version (the request can
either come from a developer or we can collectively decide that it is time
for creating an alpha version) then I will send out a notification to all
the developers. If you have some bugfixes that you would like to get into
the trunk then I will wait for those. The idea being that the alpha version
will be created once the trunk is relatively stable. The alpha code will be
from the tunk and will look like the public release distribution (a series
of tar files) that will be in password protected website.
   iii) We had a big list of people who were alpha users before the last
release. A large number of these were part of this group because they were
involved in WAVEWATCH III training and did not have access to the latest
public release. For that reason I would like to start with a new list and
all developers can provide input for the people they would like to be on
this list. Please make sure that the people you provide are responsible
enough to play by the rules (not to distribute the code further on, respect
the intellectual property of others, etc. etc.)

If any of you are uncomfortable with any of this please let me know.

2. Transitioning from switches to CPP macros. This was an idea that has
been discussed before. The change can be very significant and we do not
want this to be a disruptive procedure. But switching from in house
developed switches to using pre processing macros that are in built into
compilers is worth undertaking. Tim Campbell has set up a system where both
the switch option and the CPP macros will work. He is going to set up a
branch to demonstrate that. The advantage of that is the new stuff can be
built with macros and we can slowly move everything from switches to macros
without losing critical development time. The key to that will be for
WAVEWATCH III to work with both so that no one's research work is impacted.
Tim has a solution that he has tried in his branch and he has volunteered
to walk us through the details in the next meeting.

That is it from me. Thank you for your participation

-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
Arun Chawla
Waves Team Lead
Marine Modelling & Analysis Branch
Room 2101
National Center for Weather & Climate Prediction
5830 University Research Court
College Park, MD 20740
Ph: 301-683-3740
Fx: 301-683-3703
------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lstsrv.ncep.noaa.gov/pipermail/ncep.list.wwatch3.discussion-group/attachments/20141001/ce854333/attachment-0001.html