Summary of the meeting with the Software Product Director of FEI 3/5/2017

•  we explained the history and the situation
  • LEP experiments DELPHI and OPAL used GPHIGS for their event displays
  • The experiments were stopped in 2000
  • Software stack and access to the data is maintained in case of any discovery
  • Event displays are useful for event visualization
  • Within data archiving activities the experiment software is put on a public file system called CVMFS, with the exception of the event displays due to GPHIGS
  • The PHIGS standard has been abandoned many years ago. There are no replacements
  • Rewriting the code is not possible because of
    • Too much effort needed
    • Vanishing expertise
  • The only future use case if for educational purpose and research
  • The expected use is minimal
• Explained issues with GPHIGS
  • The newest libraries we have are from 2001
  • They have been compiled with egcs and g77, both compilers are gone
  • The libraries no longer work due to missing symbols. Ugly hacks are needed to be able to link the code
  • The code is broken in multiple ways:
    • Printing libraries produce wrong ps files which cannot be printed
    • Crashes of the code (segfaults)
    • Issues with color maps
    • No 3d acceleration
    • ...
• The FEI responsible informed us that he knows about the history and use of GPHIGS at CERN. He was one of the developers of GPHIGS at the time
  • They still sell GPHIGS and give support for it
  • They usually don't give away the source code
  • GPHIGS is fairly cheap these days
  • They can recreate the libraries for recent OS
  • They can fix issues which we report
  • Putting the libraries on CVMFS is per-se not an issue for them as long as the license key is not on this file system.
  • External users (outside our field) will have to purchase a license from them
• We have the following options:
  • Buy the source code from them
  • Let them recreate the libraries for 32bit CentOS7, we report any issues we see with the code and they will fix them