As you know, I'm trying now to get rid of all the legacy code from nnpdf for which we no longer have a maintainer. For that one of the things we need to do is to replace apfel with eko (i.e., remove the _new modifier from evolven3fit_new). By now I think eko has been time-tested more than enough for this change... and I really would like to be able to kick evolven3fit out of the default installation.
however....
There is the issue of backwards compatibility, while eko is faster and more developed than apfel the ekos often cannot be used from one version to the next. This is a big problem since nnpdf releases usually contain O(20) theories (and with N3LO and MHOU we are moving to O(100)).
I understand the rapid development associated with the qed/n3lo/mhou releases meant compromising on some other things but now that that's finished... would it be possible to offer some kind of guarantee that an eko.tar for the evolution of the PDFs computed with a version of eko will be compatible with future versions?
Of course, there might come a time when it is necessary to break backwards compatibility for whatever the reason. Right now NNPDF releases happen more or less every ~ 4 years, so I would like that the theories that are prepared for a release are utilizazble until the next one (without having to update all ekos in all theories).
I'm not asking for bug-by-bug compatibility, but to include a compatibility layer every time the format of the eko.tar would change. I would prefer a compatibility-layer in eko that is able to recognize "oh, this is an eko using the 0.15 format, let's use the 0.15 compatibility layer" rather than a conversion mechanism but I would accept a conversion mechanism as well if it is well tested.
In practical terms (I talked about guarantees before, but what does that mean) I would like a test in the CI in this repository (I can write that) that goes through a set of representative theories and checks that the ekos are still usable...
As you know, I'm trying now to get rid of all the legacy code from nnpdf for which we no longer have a maintainer. For that one of the things we need to do is to replace apfel with eko (i.e., remove the _new modifier from
evolven3fit_new). By now I think eko has been time-tested more than enough for this change... and I really would like to be able to kickevolven3fitout of the default installation.however....
There is the issue of backwards compatibility, while eko is faster and more developed than apfel the ekos often cannot be used from one version to the next. This is a big problem since nnpdf releases usually contain O(20) theories (and with N3LO and MHOU we are moving to O(100)).
I understand the rapid development associated with the qed/n3lo/mhou releases meant compromising on some other things but now that that's finished... would it be possible to offer some kind of guarantee that an eko.tar for the evolution of the PDFs computed with a version of eko will be compatible with future versions?
Of course, there might come a time when it is necessary to break backwards compatibility for whatever the reason. Right now NNPDF releases happen more or less every ~ 4 years, so I would like that the theories that are prepared for a release are utilizazble until the next one (without having to update all ekos in all theories).
I'm not asking for bug-by-bug compatibility, but to include a compatibility layer every time the format of the eko.tar would change. I would prefer a compatibility-layer in eko that is able to recognize "oh, this is an eko using the 0.15 format, let's use the 0.15 compatibility layer" rather than a conversion mechanism but I would accept a conversion mechanism as well if it is well tested.
In practical terms (I talked about guarantees before, but what does that mean) I would like a test in the CI in this repository (I can write that) that goes through a set of representative theories and checks that the ekos are still usable...