Steering Committee Meeting - 6/6/2017 (Florence, Italy)

Minutes -

It was the 2nd meeting of the Tango consortium after signing the collaboration contract between 8 partners

Present:

  • Jean-Michel Chaize: Coordinator
  • Andy Gotz: Chairman representing ESRF
  • Alain Buteau: representing SOLEIL
  • David Fernandez: representing ALBA
  • Claudio Scafuri: representing ELETTRA
  • Thorsten Kracht: representing DESY
  • Wojciech Kitka: representing SOLARIS
  • Vincent Hardion: representing MAXIV
  • Cristina Knapic: representing INAF

Observers:

The representatives of 2 institutions applying for joining the committee have been invited
  • Nick Rees and Lorenzo Pivetta: representing SKA Office 
  • Lize Van den heever: representing SKA South Africa

State of the collaboration contract:

  • The collaboration contract had been amendement to allow the signature of new members. SKA Office (SKA-O) and SKA South Africa (SKA-SA) expressed their willing to sign the contract and to join the committee. The new version of the contract and the amendements including these 2 new members have been distributed to the representative of the existing members for approval. The signature should take place within the civil year 2017 and will validate a membership for the full year 2017. 
    • Decision: The committee approved this decision. Unanimous vote.
    • Info: The contract will be signed by the legal representatives of SKA-O and SKA-SA by the summer 2017, then ESRF will send invoices for full year fees
  • Jean-Michel informed that discussions are in progress with new potential members for 2018.   ELI-Beamlines has clearly expressed his willing to join and proposed to organize he next Tango meeting. Some discussions are in progress with ONERA and LMJ but no clear engagement from the management yet.

Discussion about the budget

  • ESRF presented a summary of the spending for the year 2016. We discussed step by step each points in respect to the initial budget. the main points were the following:
    • Device server catalog development outsourcing
    • C++ and JAVA Kernel code re-factoring preparation and migration to Github.
    • PyTango 9 development outsourcing.
    • Web site maintenance and hosting
    • Documentation refurbishment
    • Travel expenses for Kernel developers group 
    • OmniOrb support contract.

Decision: The committee approved this budget report. Unanimous vote.

A discussion took place for improving the follow-up of the actions by the delegates. Soleil proposes that next time a report document is sent to all delegate. This report should contain the detailed description of what has been ordered and the acceptance document. It has been agreed that the Steering Committee needs a common private document repository to share the official documents (contracts, orders, budget, etc...). It has also been agreed that each action/order should be followed by one delegate who takes care of the conformity of the executed task in respect to the specification. It is not a good thing if all the tasks are followed by a single person at ESRF.

TODO: ESRF will prepare such a repository and deposit official documents in it. All the invoces and acceptance documents will be deposited in it.

  • The budget 2017 was presented by ESRF, This budget allready includes the incomes linked to the subscription of SKA-O and SKA-SA. the following lines have been discussed and accepted.
    • C++ and Java kernel libraries development and refactor for preparing Tango V10 and long term support of Tango V9
    • Tango documentation refurbishment next step
    • Device Class catalog to be continued
    • Windows packaging and continuous integration
    • PyTango continuous integration for various flavor of Windows.
    • Maintenance, development and hosting of web site, forums and mailing list: 
    • Maintenance contract for OmniORB: continue
    • Travel for kernel group and documentation camp: OK to finance the travel of kernel developers to ESRF
    • Buffer budget for contribution to the organisation of communication events (Tango meetings, workshops, promotion actions etc...)
    • Decision: The committee approved the presented budget. Unanimous vote

It has been proposed and agreed to add an item in the budget for building  a virtual machine from the continuous integration and packaging systems in such a way that a Tango VM can always been downloaded with the latest versions of the code.

TODO: ESRF will add this point and find a company to execute this task. A delegate should be nominated to follow-up this task, no decision has been taken on this point. 

Multi Annual subcontracting contract

In order to increase the number of core developers and ensure the long term support for Tango we propose to setup a multi-annual contract for financing extra developers on a semi-permanent basis. The goal is maintain the control and supervision of the core development within the community and to agree on which parts of the core development can be sub-contracted. The sub-contracting will be financed by the Tango Control Collaboration contract. ESRF presented a document describing this project in view of signing such a contract from the year 2018 and next years. For doing this, we need to precisely define what we specify, how to validate the specifications and how to control their execution. The company should be selected after a proper Call For Tender managed by ESRF and following the CFT rules of ESRF.

Decision: The committee approved the principle of having a multi-annual contractor. Unanimous vote

ICALEPCS 2017 tango workshop.

  • We discussed the organisation and the contents of the next Tango Workshop which will take place in Barcelona on Saturday October 9th. All delegates have been asked to propose contributors to this workshop.
  • We discussed and established the following draft agenda
    • The morning session will be an overview for new comers with a special focus on the new features interesting also for regular users
    • The afternoon session will address more expert items in the form of example or case studies. The following fields have been agreed
      • Multithreading: The best manner to handle Multithreading starting from a real example
      • HDB++, how to handle it, install it and configure it
      • Event system: How to configure in an efficient manner all the events, the traps to avoid, the usual mistakes etc...
      • Logging system: An example of interface with ElasticSearch
      • High speed detectors: How to manage them in a Tango system
    • ESRF, Alba, Soleil, MaXIV, Elettra and DESY proposed their contribution.

TODO: ESRF will prepare an agenda and coordinate the contributions

Next Tango meeting​

  • ELI-Beamlines is proposed as the organiser of the next Tango meeting for the 1st half of June 2018 (To be confirmed) near Prague.   If not confirmed DESY has offered to organize it. Anyway, DESY is willing to organize the meeting of june 2019