On 09/23/2016 02:43 PM, Frank Loeffler wrote:
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).
Would people really remember to put the REQUIRES statement in their
thorn? I'd prefer something more automatic.
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
I think I'd prefer to have the citation come with a comment that makes
it clear when it should be included in a paper.
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
I'd prefer one bibtex file only. There could be a key inside each entry
identifying the thorn.
--Steve
Of course, depending on our wishes, part of this can and should be
configurable via parameters.
Frank Loeffler
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