[Users] Meeting minutes for 2024-12-12

[Lucas Timotheo Sanches]

Attendees: Lucas (Minutes), Zachariah Etienne, Peter Diener,
Roland Hass (chair), Steven R. Brandt, Leo Rosa Werneck, Maxwell Rizzo

# Pre-agenda topics
  * Zach asked for updated citations for the new release on Zenodo. Roland did
    so right away.
  * SPEC v8: Steve reports that Cactus is still proceeding at being a SPEC
    benchmark. The SPEC team reports successfully compiling a severely reduced
    version of Cactus on Windows with MSVC.

# "Canon" Release post-mortem
  * Roland's thoughts on this release were the following: He believes it was an
    "Okish release". In his opinion, we were delayed for too long (even though
    there are always delays). He stresses the importance of getting service
    accounts in repos so that people can create branches with these accounts.
    This should make it easier for contributors and release managers to make
    edits. He wants to clean it up, too many manual steps should be more
    automated. Judgment calls should also be reduced.
  * More updates for the gallery examples are still needed.

# Upcoming release
  * Roland asked if any of the present would volunteer to be release manager
    assistant for the upcoming release. So far, there were none.
  * Codes for possible inclusion in the next release were discussed:
    1. Z4c: Champions: Erik, Roland. Reviewers: Steve and Peter.
    2. BHaHAHA: Champion: Zach, Review: Steve.
    3. CCE data writer: Champion: Deborah Ferguson, Review: Peter Diener
    4. New modules for cosmology: Hayley Macpherson needs to be contacted and
       asked if she has any code she would like to include.
    5. More gallery examples: Roland suggested that we create more gallery
       examples for alternative codes that already exist in the toolkit, such
       as Fishbone-Moncrief, Canuda, Baikal and others.

# Mailing list
  No emails.

# Open tickets
  * 2836: Roland and Erik are reviewing it.
  * 2835: Roland suggests that anyone that wants backtrace in Carpet should
    review this ticket.
  * 2633: Peter apologizes for not having time to look at this last
week and says
    he will take a look.
  * 963: Peter wanted to contact Zach to discuss the improvements, but got
    delayed. Zach reports he still needs to move some of the improvements to
    Baikal.

# Tickets ready for review
  * No new updates on any specific ticket.
  * Maxwell Rizzo has reported an issue with the Anvil cluster. He reports that
    simfactory is producing invalid job ids when recovering jobs that are old
    but whose data still exists. Roland says there is a bug in simfactory when
    getting job IDs which may be related to this. He suggests artificially
    setting the job id in the properties.ini simfactory file to anything other.
    than -1, which signifies an invalid job.

# Other topics
  * Zach initiated a discussion on the inconvenience of getting proper
   citations for individual thorns used during Cactus execution. This, he adds,
   may lead to codes being used without proper citation in application papers.

   He proposes that whenever Cactus runs, a bibtex file is emitted for the
   active thorns in the parameter file being run. This would help users note
   and remember to properly cite the papers of the codes being used.

   Roland pointed out that similar functionality was proposed (and never
   reviewed or accepted) in ticket 2254, which uses extra bibtex tags in
   formaline

   Zach argued that a solution using formaline may be easily disabled, as for
   instance, he dislikes using formaline for production builds as it takes a
   long time for it to run.

   Lucas suggested for Cactus to officially add .bib files (along with .ccl
   files) as an optional file in the definition of a Thorn. Users could then
   optionally include a .bib file in their thorn directories containing
   citation information. After that, either the flesh or an offline tool would
   read a parameter files' ActiveThorn list and concatenate the citations for
   each of the thorns used.

   The suggestion was liked, however Zach pointed out that simple concate-
   nation may not be enough, as some thorns may have overlapping citations.

   Steve pointed out that Piraha has a grammar for .bib files and can parse
   them. This should come in handy if parsing these files is necessary.

   To end the meeting on time, Roland suggested that we continue this
   discussion next week.