Results of the CS Workshop 2008

Some Attendees

Below is the official photo of the workshop, which we made quite late on the second day. Please note that our photographer, Gabriele Otto, managed to include two remote participants. In addition, if you watch very closely, you even see a third remote participant on the screen of the notebook in front.

Discussion notes

Sourceforge

• Packages
  • Developer has to provide sources and documentation
  • Dietrich offers support for publishing a package to Sourceforge
• At least a list of available classes under developement should be published.
  • A table in the project web page?
    • Class
    • Description
    • Responsible developer ccontact information
    • A flag in the description of the class.lvlib: INFO2SF
• Backup?

eLog

• Next EE/KS student will implement a first version of a eLog-DIM-Gateway.

Packaging

• Include a change-log file option in the Packager.

Notifications

• Proposal by HB is agreed.
  • Sourceforge is primary for general user information, except documentation. Anonymous users can become notified by, as an example, RSS feeds to the "News". Mailing list will be used to push important informations
  • Wiki is for developer and documentation. Only registered users will get notified on Wiki

Requirements

• Versioned configuration database
• Installer and Demo CS System

Questions

• Is the DSC 8.2.1 engine necessary to bind to OPC items, or is it sufficient to compile an executable with the option "enhanced DSC runtime support"?

More notes

• Frank Herfurth: *reduce number of configuration files
• Dietrich Beck:
  • Configurations of independent tools should stay independent
• Stefan Götte:
  • Tool to distribute executables and configurations to remote nodes for local access
  • Data collection and storage? Reason agaainst: missing support for custom data formats.
    • Maybe full XML support?

CS Future

• short term
  • Support of LabVIEW versions?
    • Stay as long as possible, slow progress.
    • Stability is most important.
  • Migration of DSC 7.1 -> 8.2.1
  • Maintain existing configuration tools
    • users will report bugs by providing an exact sequence of mouse-clicks and description of environemnt that allows to reproduce the bug
    • maybe make those tools more comfortable
  • Improve documention and training material.
  • Workshop on Generic Data Collection, Storage and Retrieving!
    • Stefan Götte specifies at least a half DIN A4 page of documentation!!!
• mid term
  • Thread pool for CS threads?
  • Central Configurator Wizzard?
• long term
  • One central data base, maybe Oracle?
    • HB: I think a general solution is out of scope. It is too experiment specific and must be done by them!
    • DB: None of us (db, hb) is a database specialist. As I wild guess, I think we would need a Postdoc for a couple of years, even if we strongly restrict the requirements to the absolute minimum.

-- DietrichBeck - 23 Jun 2008