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

[Hart, William E]

Andreas, et al:

I like your summary of the issues.  In particular, I agree that we
shouldn't encourage users to checkout CoinAll unless they really need
_everything_.  Still, there groups like us at Sandia who _would_ like to
checkout everything ... or more to the point ... just-about-everything.
:)

I think the main value of a CoinAll project is that, with regular
testing, it will highlight incompatibilities between project APIs.  The
key is the testing, as otherwise I agree that CoinAll is more of a
hassle than anything.

We face a similar issues in Sandia's Acro software w.r.t. inter-project
interdependencies.  Nightly testing has provided a significant impetus
for resolving issues, since you have regular feedback to developers as
to the 'health' of software.  Further, comparisons between CoinAll and
other Coin projects provide clear indications of which projects are
problematic.


At INFORMS I mentioned that I would be interested in supporting a
CoinAll project.  Given the caveats of this discussion, my goal would be
to have this project be stable "on a regular basis", rather than all the
time.  For example, we only plan overall Acro releases a few times a
year.  It's too painful to get all of the software components
synchronized more often than that.

--Bill

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: coin-discuss-bounces at list.coin-or.org 
> [mailto:coin-discuss-bounces at list.coin-or.org] On Behalf Of 
> Andreas Waechter
> Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 1:54 PM
> To: weiguo liu
> Cc: coin-discuss at list.coin-or.org
> Subject: [Coin-discuss] Re: What happend to CoinAll src?
> 
> 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
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