Resource management

[cschwan]

I think it would be useful to have the following features:

• download PDFs from multiple places or 'registries', for instance http://lhapdfsets.web.cern.ch/lhapdfsets/current/, but also other http servers
• aliases for PDF sets, for instance NNPDF40 = NNPDF40_nnlo_as_01180

A configuration file would be needed for these features.

[alecandido]

A configuration file would be needed for these features.

Already present: https://github.com/AleCandido/partons/blob/main/partons/src/configs.rs

It should look like this: https://github.com/AleCandido/partons/blob/dc585d3a5d58ffdbfd0ace911b6b514d59adcd3a/partons.toml#L1-L5

• download PDFs from multiple places or 'registries', for instance http://lhapdfsets.web.cern.ch/lhapdfsets/current, but also other http servers

Half-done:

• info files are there, but I can't parse MAP ones, because they contain repeated fields, that is not valid YAML and serde-yaml refuses to help...
• downloading the full PDF sets is just a matter of doing the same of the info file for the tarball (or other equivalent archive, later on configurable)
  • but I need to parse them, and I have a fully-compliant parser for LHAPDF already done in Python (implemented following the original paper and already tested), so the moment I will have the files I can translate the parser (I was just stuck at the info file)

[alecandido]

Moreover, I want to drop the original file format of LHAPDF, and just keep it for compatibility:

• the info file will be there and similar, but attributes will be documented and a subset of mandatory attributes will be specified
• the grid files will be dumped in a binary format (to save considerable storage for large sets) and with serde, to avoid the need of a dedicated (and slower) parser

The LHAPDF one will be kept anyhow, for compatibility.

[alecandido]

Another bit it is worth to mention here is what we discussed about "configuring a server".

Since the server configuration, for a given server, should be the same for all the clients (at least the basic part, further customization might be allowed), it should be hosted at a single URL on the server itself, such that:

partons remote add [<optional-name>] https://pdfsets.nnpdf.science/configuration.json

is directly registering the server in the local configs file.