Fermitools Roadmap

This is general outline of the future plans for the Fermitools. It was updated in September 2020 to reflect how the releases actually happened. Priorities after the Python 3 release are now being discussed to determine future plans.

Releases

• 2018 Q3 Fermitools release 1.0.0
  • Initial release.
  • Switch to Conda for distribution.
• 2019 Q1 Patch release
  • Fix problem with gtsrcmaps not working (Likelihood #10).
  • Include other likelihood fixes by Eric.
• 2019 Q3 Feature Release
  • Improve handling of energy dispersion (JIRA LK-141).
  • Added gtdrm to write energy dispersion matrix (JIRA LK-143).
  • Various other enhancements or bug fixes.
• 2020 Q1 Patch release
  • Fix various issues.
• 2020 Q3 Python 3 transition and C++11 Compatibility Release
  • Transition to Python 3, ROOT 6, and updated compilers.
  • Moved pipeline to Microsoft Azure.
  • Build system modified to help developers.
• 2022 Q2 ROOT-free release
  • Remove ROOT from the standard tools.
  • Will reduce installation issues and speed up build process.
  • Add native ARM builds for Apple silicon (e.g., M1) processors
• 2022 Q3 Patch release

Long term changes

These are ideas that should be done but may take a long time. They could be worked on in parallel with the releases or scheduled for a specific future release.

• Increase build modularity
  • Separate packages so they can be built and tested without requiring rebuilding dependencies or unrelated packages.
  • This would speed up our builds and unit tests.
• Improve unit tests
  • Separate flyweight and integration tests. Improve reporting.
  • Possibly use some of the analysis threads that have been converted to python notebooks.
• Support alternate distribution mechanisms, e.g., pip, brew, apt-get, etc.
• Better fermipy integration.
• Improve/fix gtorbsim.
• Organize and deal with unresolved JIRA issues. Group them into logical blocks and assign to releases.
• Build natively on Apple ARM architecture.