Discussion: Restoring HepRepFile driver support via containerized HepRApp

In short, no, it won’t be reverted. We have been discussing solutions for longer term deprecation and removal of drivers (and features more generally) here: 30th Geant4 Collaboration Meeting (20-24 October 2025): Integration/Deprecation of features in the Geant4 Toolkit · Indico. The code for the driver is of course available in older releases and people are welcome to take it as-is and use/support it. Equally, if there are sufficient people willing to take on maintenance, development and support, and sufficient community interest then we could discuss hosting it under the Geant4 GitHub org as described in that link.

Note also that HepRApp itself is no longer maintained and there was a call here: Installing and/or running HepRApp - #7 by jiperl five years ago which as far as I know no one took up (I’m happy to be corrected!). Containerisation helps of course, but if there’s no actual work going on to update or maintain the code itself I’m not sure that’s a long term sustainable solution (in terms of why the driver should be provided in the toolkit itself).