[Swift-devel] Planning next set of Swift features and releases

[Mihael Hategan]

On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 09:55 +0000, Ben Clifford wrote:

> > Auto app install
> 
> singel-executable staging is< i think, easily achieveable. anything more 
> complex than that is not achievable for a 1.0 release. That does not 
> preclude ongoing ADEM (or related to ADEM) development as a separate 
> component (much as Falkon is or the log-processing stuff was)
> 

I think the auto app install issue is a difficult one. I'm thinking of
our alleged typical science user, who patches together applications from
various sources, some stable, some not, some picky about their
environment some less so.

I believe that the only reasonable solution to the problem is
virtualization. The scenario is that in which the user builds a VM that
they can test locally, and which works the same on any resource used,
without the need to re-compile, tweak, troubleshoot, debug, etc. I'm not
sure what the state of VM support is on the TG and/or OSG (maybe Kate
can comment on this), but I think without it, our users will invariably
need to trade between effort of installing applications on resources and
ability to load-balance or deal with transient site issues.