[Coin-discuss] Re: What happend to CoinAll src?

[Andreas Waechter]

Hi Weiguo,

Sorry for not replying to your message earlier - I was on vacation.

I'm sending my reply to the coin-discuss mailing list, since this is not a 
decision I could make on my own:

> I understand the difficulties to keep tracking of the dependency, but without 
> CoinAll, the difficulties are still there.
> I tried to get FlopC++ that includes OSI, CLP, CGL and CBC I need. But in 
> that package CLP does not match CGL. If I get CBC and OSI, I have two copies 
> of CLP. Its hard to judge which one to use.
> Good thing about CoinAll is that you can deselect modules and form whatever 
> combination you want. I think setting up a stable (or beta) and a product 
> version are the way to resolve dependency issue. And maybe place like CoinAll 
> should include only stable version. Don't you agree?

You pinpointed out the problem quite precisely:  It is very hard to judge 
which version is to be used, when we are dealing with those connected COIN 
projects like Osi, Clp, Cbc etc.  The problem is that there are different 
project managers behind the different projects, which make updates in 
different frequencies.

We thought that it is good practice that each project manager should 
try to set up the "externals" for his/her package (ie., the thing that 
includes code from possibly more than one project), so that everything is 
consistent.  This might mean that if updates are done more frequently for 
one package than for another, that two different codes for a particular 
project might be involved, and those might not be consistent.  Even if you 
are only using stable branches you might run into conflicts once we have 
more than one stable branch for a project.

When we had CoinAll set up earlier, it was mainly meant for project 
managers to give them a chance to get something with more of the code, and 
it was to be used knowing that things might break.  What we found is that 
many regular users that were interested in only one package (like Cbc), 
downloaded CoinAll (for convenience?), which caused a lot of confusion and 
things didn't work well.  This is why we decided to take it off again.

In principle it would be nice to have something like the CoinAll package, 
that includes the source code for all of COIN's projects.  However, 
someone would have to maintain this, and it seems to be quite a hassle to 
be up to speed and to try to reconcile any incompatibilities.

Of course, any suggestions on how to improve things are welcome - and if 
you volunteer to become a project manager for a CoinAll project, that 
would of course also be great! :)

Cheers

Andreas