[Users] thorns providing citations

[Frank Loeffler]

Hi,

This is a proposal about how thorns can provide citations of resources 
(papers, ...), and how Cactus could use those to output a list of 'used 
resources'.

I would like to make this the topic for the October-hack-a-day, if I 
find one or two more interested people. It shouldn't take more than that 
day to get something working. Before that, however, we should discuss 
what this should actually look like.

The rest of this email is details about the proposal. If you are not 
interested, you can stop reading here. If you are, please let us know 
what you think after you've read it.


While I said 'resources', I mean citations, usually to papers, but 
really it could be anything.

There is also the question of how to cite something, and in the 
following I am assuming bibtex entries, as that is what most likely most 
people would find useful.

First of all, thorns would need to have a way to provide citations. 
Thorns already provide all kinds of stuff, and most of that is 
'announced to Cactus' in configuration.ccl, so let's use that, and not 
create yet another .ccl file:

  PROVIDES CITATION name AS "xyz"
  PROVIDES CITATION name IN bibtex filename, relative to thorn dir
  REQUIRES CITATION name

This gives each citation a name, and would use that in a key-value table 
as key, where the value is a bibtex-entry, verbatim and (in this 
proposal) unparsed by Cactus. The name should ideally be the same as the 
key in the bibtex entry, but it doesn't need to be. We could decide to 
enforce equality, but then would have to parse the entry / bib file.

This mechanism would only provide a way to define citations, and use 
them if you can be sure another thorn already provides it (REQUIRES).

The next question would be how to tell Cactus that a certain citation 
should be included in the output, and what that output should look like. 
We already have two "classes" of citations in the ET: "requested" and 
"optional". "requested" citations should be cited whenever that piece of 
code was used, while "optional" are, well, optional. Thus, we should 
have a way to provide those. Also, whether a citation should be included 
might depend on parameters (we do have a few examples of those), and not 
just thorn activation. Thus, I believe the best way to include this is

schedule.ccl:

  CITATION name
  CITATION OPTIONAL name

These could be stand-alone, top-level statements, or be inside 
if-blocks, similar to, e.g., STORAGE statements. These statements only 
use the name of the citation as defined above - not the actual citation 
string itself.

Once a citation is marked as 'being used', it will not be 'unmarked' 
within that run.

Using this information, Cactus will then provide output regarding which 
citations are used, by which thorn, and of which type (requested, 
optional). This output is updated (overwritten) each time something is 
added (but waits until the regular thorn-activation sequence is 
completed).

The output should, at least, consist of:
- one bibtex file containing all known entries
- two lists of keys, in machine readable format: requested/optional
- machine readable information about which thorn requested what how

Of course, depending on our wishes, part of this can and should be 
configurable via parameters.

Frank Loeffler


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