HOWTO's - Another Source of Guidance for BaBarians
Along with the Workbook for BaBar Offline Users, experts in the
Collaboration also contribute to a set of ascii files called
HOW-TOs. These are task-specific instructions and examples that are
currently maintained by Pete
Elmer. Some of the information from these HOW-TO's has been
incorporated into the Workbook, but these are an excellent source of
information, particularly for more-detailed studies.
The HOWTO's are a package of ascii documents created by Pete Elmer
which can be checked out like any other package of BaBar code.
The three HOWTO's that are of more general interest are:
- HOWTO-Basic-Debugging
- HOWTO-CVS-Tips-and-Tricks
- HOWTO-MC-Tips-and-Tricks
In particular, you should read HOWTO-Basic-Debugging once you have
started to run BaBar analysis jobs, as it explains how to report
problems, how to run the various BaBar debuggers, etc. This document
is also linked and a recent version is available in the Workbook
section Debugging.
A number of the HOWTO's are not of general interest, but more for
people working in the computing organization, e.g.:
- HOWTO-DB-SchemaManagement
- HOWTO-DB-SetUp-OPR-REPRO-SP-Test-FDB
- HOWTO-Load-Random-Triggers-From-Xtc
- HOWTO-database-importing
- HOWTO-database-tags-test
- HOWTO-fullTestBuild
- HOWTO-letteredBuild
- HOWTO-physicsPackageTest
- HOWTO-skimBuild
The SoftRelTools package contains two very useful HOWTO document:
- SoftRelTools/HOWTO-GNUmakefile
- SoftRelTools/HOWTO-dependency
as well as several others which are more specialised, including
- SoftRelTools/HOWTO-ROOT
- SoftRelTools/HOWTO-bison
- SoftRelTools/HOWTO-flex
There are other HOWTO documents in specific packages, but they tend
to be fairly technical and beyond the scope of material covered in the
Offline Workbook.
You can see the latest versions of the HOWTO files in the
"newest" BaBar code release at:
There are two ways to get copies of the HOWTO documentation. The
first is to check out the HOWTO package like any other BaBar software
package (see the Quicktour
section of the BaBar Offline Workbook for information about checking
out new packages):
addpkg HOWTO
Since the HOWTO package is updated relatively frequently, it is
perhaps best to look at the newest version of this package, as well as
the version associated with the currently software release you are
using. All BaBar packages can be found in the directory:
$BFDIST/releases
The latest version of a particular HOWTO is in:
$BFROOT/dist/releases/newest/HOWTO/HOWTO-whatever
A list of all CVS packages to browse can be obtained on the
cvsweb Main Page (you will need a hypernews password for
access). This is a WWW interface for CVS repositories which allows you
to browse through packages and see the revision history for each
file. This is extremely useful as it allows you to see which
files were most recently changed as well as listing differences
between versions of files.
Because of the large number of packages, the main cvsweb page can take
a long time to load, so you will probably want to bookmark the pages
for your favorite packages, e.g.
cvsweb page for HOWTO package. To view the latest version of a
given HOWTO, click on the revision number (or the HOWTO name and then
revision number from that link).
cvsweb has some nice features: When one is looking at a particular
package (for example the HOWTO package linked above), one can click on
the column headers to re-sort the entries by various attributes. For
example, if one clicks on "Age" one can re-sort to see what
has changed most recently in this package (a useful query when one has
the feeling that ones code is now crashing because of some recent
change in a package).
General related documents:
Author:
Jenny Williams
Last significant update: 18 April 2001 (page created)
Last modified: 5 June 2005
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