Geant4 - outdated and not maintained

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Oct 30, 2012, at 08:31, Mojca Miklavecwrote:

> I would like to see Geant4 upgraded to 9.5 and I would like to create
> and maintain a port for Gate 6.2. I have a working CMake-based port
> for Geant4 9.5, but it still needs some work to support all the
> options that are currently supported in 9.4.
> 
> I have a meeting with one of the developers of Gate on Thursday. I
> hope that he will help me resolve some problems I have with building
> the current version of Gate (no developer uses Mac OS X, so support is
> very limited). The latest version of Gate depends on Geant4 9.5, so I
> really need the latest version if I want to create a port for Gate.
> 
> My questions are:
> - Is anyone else willing to take over maintenance of Geant4?
> - Would it be acceptable to have versioned Geant4 ports and if so -
> how many versions would be acceptable? Would it be ok to have support
> for 4.9.4, 4.9.5 and 4.9.6? The last one is experimental and the
> versions are not really compatible with each other. The version 4 in
> Geant4 is really a different program from Geant3. So the numbering is
> actually 9.4, 9.5 and 9.6. Physicists usually need a very specific
> version to run their applications. (There is one additional number,
> for example 4.9.5.p02 to denote patchlevel 2 - something that can
> safely be upgraded without the need for a special version.)

If users would want to install specific versions, as you say they would, then yes, having versioned ports would be a good idea. It would be best if they could all be installed simultaneously, but that will take more work, both in the geant ports and in any ports that depend on them.