On Mon, 29 Jun 2009, Mark Taylor wrote:

> Peter et al.,
>
> I've now completed SAMP in GAIA, and (if I've told git what
> I think I've told it) pushed the changes back to the repository.

Hmm, that didn't go as well as it might. It's not obvious to me what went 
wrong, but for some reason many of the dates on previous commits have been 
changed and you ended up Tim's (initially) hated "Merge branch...". On the 
bright-side the changes are there.

(One problem is certainly that you didn't "git pull --rebase" when git 
refused your push, that's usually a good idea when upstream changes need 
to be merged before you can push).

> GAIA now communicates using SAMP, but not using PLASTIC.  It would have 
> been possible to get it doing both, but somewhat more effort, more 
> complication and more chances for things to go wrong, so given that I'm 
> expecting PLASTIC to fall into disuse soon, I took the easy route.

OK.

> Files which are no longer required have been removed. I've made an 
> update to SUN/214 which I think covers the current situation in a 
> similar level of detail to what was there before. I haven't changed 
> gaia.news, but I can supply something on request.

Thanks, I've added a quick note to gaia.news and attempted an update of 
the on-line help files (those in gaia.htx). Once I merge my developments 
to master you can have a look at those if you want.

> Any problems or queries, let me know.

Just one. Did the sending of a spectrum from GAIA to SPLAT work for you?
Seems to be completely broken for me. I suspect this is my problem.

> Most of the MTypes implemented are the standard SAMP ones.
> I've also added an MType gaia.execute.tcl as follows
> (see GaiaSampAgent.tcl):
>
>   #  MType specification:
>   #     MType:
>   #        gaia.execute.tcl
>   #     Parameters:
>   #        script (string) - executable Tcl
>   #     Return values:
>   #        value (string) - return value of successfully executed script
>
> which allows remote control in much the same way as the PLASTIC
> ivo://plastic.starlink.ac.uk/gaia/executeMd5 message did.  The MD5
> cookie business is no longer required because SAMP, unlike PLASTIC,
> exercises reasonable control over who is able to send messages.
> To see this working you can e.g. use JSAMP's MessageSender utility:
>
>   % starjava/bin/jsamp messagesender -mtype gaia.execute.tcl \
>                                      -param script "expr 1 + 2"
>
>   c1 (gaia)
>      samp.status: samp.ok
>      samp.result: value 3

OK, no one ever asked about that feature, so as long as it's secure.

Cheers,

Peter.