what is this about?

Werner mentioned at some point, that we need some way to collect the results of
our analysis transparently, while the analysis in on going.
I do not mean only the analysis you all know, which aims 
for getting some theta^2 plot or some light curve, but I mean all different kinds
of information, which might be used for understanding some features.

Let me give a small example:
Assume we want to anlyse some time of data, say 4 runs. 
Usually you have then the following files:
    * N data files
    * 1 pedestal file
    * 1 LP file
    * DRS amplitude calibration files
    * DRS time calibration files
    * several slow control files
    * 1 closed shutter run, for gain analysis
but depending on what kind of analysis you do, some if these files might miss.
You might not even have physics data, since you analyse LP data at the moment.

And using this comparably large and complicated number of files containing 
different information, you plan to retrieve different kinds of information 
such as:
    * the behaviour of the baseline, using chunks of data of say 500 events
    * the behaviour of the interleaved LP data
    * image parameters from the physics events
        - using the information from interleaved ped and LP events *and*
        - using the information of the dedicated ped and LP runs
    * ...

And in order to start your analysis, you might apply some of the basic classes
we currently have at hand. 
Assume you:
    * apply DRS-amplitude calibration & spike removal
    * do some sort of filtering of the data
    * test some sort of signal extraction, which might need some 
        special information from the dedicated pedestal run for example.
        
And assume you aim to test, how the signal extraction behaves, if the 
way you calculated the pedestal changes.
I guess, at this point you would be glad to have some transparent way of 
treating all these intermediate results.
And in the end, you might want to print some sort of
    "what files and classes did I use, in order to generate this plot"
    
If you could get this, without noting it in your laboratory notebook,
but rather get it automatically, because the results, and the way you got them
store themselves somewhere, I guess you would be glad.

At the time beeing(14.03.12) we are a bit bound to do all these analyses apart from
each other and using the results of say some baseline analysis steps is not yet 
included nicely into analysis steps, which might follow.

And doing a special and maybe complicated analysis in several small steps,
is not a bad thing. So it would be nice, to have some means of tracking what 
was done in the entire analysis, and also to have some way of collecting all the 
results and also intermediate results. Which are needed for debugging of course.


So I made up my mind, and I think there is nothing which has to be written 
or developed. The normal standard dict class of python is all we need.
It is simple to use. Flexible enough for storing whatever one likes.
And can be stored to a file using the pickle and unpickle classes.