Wire-Cell News (Posts about build)

Build system cleanup

Brett Viren — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 15:32:43 GMT

The Waf-based build system for the toolkit is recently cleaned up and expanded to support user packages. For existing users this change should be invisible. This post gives the details of the change, what to do when updates to the build system are needed and how to use it for to build your own WCT-related packages.

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Repository Reorganization

Brett Viren — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 18:49:32 GMT

Meet the new wire-cell-toolkit source repository.

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Containers and Continuous Integration

Brett Viren — Sun, 28 Jul 2019 16:56:36 GMT

Previously posts have discussed Singularity containers which were introduced to provide easy development environments. Recently, Docker container descriptions have been developed to introduce Travis-CI continuous integration to the Wire-Cell Toolkit.

Certifiable Singularity

Brett Viren — Thu, 02 May 2019 17:49:53 GMT

A new Singularity container is available which provides Kerberos clients, kx509 and other stuff that is needed to download DUNE data.

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ROOT dependency management changes

Brett Viren — Thu, 25 Apr 2019 18:32:35 GMT

A change is recently made to how WCT depends on ROOT. This dependency has been concentrated to a single, new package, not surprisingly called wire-cell-root.

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Singularity Containers for WCT and WC/LS Running and Development

Brett Viren — Fri, 17 Aug 2018 13:30:33 GMT

As part of an enjoyable tutorial on applying machine learning techniques to LArTPC given by Kazu at BNL we were introduced to Singularity containers. There's been some WCT-related work in the past using Docker containers but that fizzled due to Docker's complexity and usage barrier (even if that leads to better build performance and features). It was immediately clear from Kazu's tutorial that Singularity reduces the usage barrier and would solve a big problem for the WCT team. Namely the difficulties we have in building FNAL's art and LArSoft (LS) software ecosystem on our computers. With Singularity containers we now have a way for just one person to suffer and let many others benefit.

Porting and Integration Begun

Brett Viren — Mon, 03 Jul 2017 19:20:25 GMT

Xin concluded an intense effort to port the prototype signal processing code into the toolkit.

With hints from Lynn Garren (FNAL) a method to set up an environment where both WCT and its LArSoft integration package (larwirecell) can be simultaneously developed.

New Configuration Data Package

Brett Viren — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 19:18:19 GMT

Today a new package joins the WCT family.

https://github.com/WireCell/wire-cell-data

This collects the "configuration data" files which are needed for input to WCT. These are generally compressed JSON files which have been converted to a WCT standard format from a variety of sources. The data includes wire geometry, field response, noise spectra and a couple initial deposition files.

Having this repository makes it easier for users to prepare to run WCT. At some point in the future this package may be installed along with the code, but for now, users need to clone this repo. For WCT to locate these files the produced directory needs to be added to the user's WIRECELL_PATH environment variable.

See the README file for details including a summary of the files available and commands to remake these files from their upstream sources.

Previously this data was kept online in a directory dump. That's still there for now. It includes some files not added to GitHub. In particular the "upstream" data from which the JSON files are converted (eg, the Garfield output) can be found. And next door to that directory is a plot dump directory which contains some diagnostic plots related to the conversion of these files which may be useful for experts to browse.

Build Cleanups

Brett Viren — Wed, 21 Jun 2017 19:16:40 GMT

Today sees some long needed cleanups in how we build WCT and WCP and their externals. In particular:

Jsonnet, as previously announced is now required by WCT has a build package added to wire-cell-spack.
A source mirror is now available in case you have trouble getting any required dependencies. The Spack build will use this mirror automatically after being configured as shown in the README file.
Besides the tip of the master branch, specific releases starting with 0.5.2 of WCT can now be installed with Spack.
The WCP and its dependencies can now be built using wire-cell-spack. WCP uses a subset of the packages that WCT requires and the two can be installed side-by-side sharing these packages.
See also this section of the README for recommended way to develop either WCP or WCT code against Spack-built dependencies.
The cursed XData package is removed from both WCP and WCT.

Jsonnet now mandatory and CLI parameter injection

Brett Viren — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 18:34:03 GMT

Jsonnet is now a required external dependency.

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