[yt-dev] Near- and mid-term roadmap: 2.4, 2.x, 3.0

[Matthew Turk]

Hi all,

Now that 2.4 is out, I wanted to update you on where this roadmap
(from early June, two months ago today!) is.  It slipped a bit, but I
think we're still broadly on track.

My current plan is to focus on development of the 3.0 branch/fork,
which is located here:

http://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt-3.0

It is nearly functional for all major functions from the patch-based
perspective, but I am still working on projections and a handful of
other operations -- flushing data back to grids (for clump finding),
masking of cells (for extracted regions), and a few other medium-level
features.  Once it has reached feature completeness for patch-based, I
think it will be ready to have many of you start testing it, kicking
the tires, maybe even moving your development there.  I'll update this
group as I make progress, but I'd also be very appreciative if anyone
wants to start testing it with me and working on it.  I'm quite
excited about some aspects of it, and I've already been pleased with
simplifications in several areas.

We should still probably leave open the possibility of a 2.5 release,
but with a much shorter changelog than 2.4 had!  :)

I'll be around in IRC as well as on the mailing list if anyone has any
concerns, suggestions, or wants to get involved in this.

-Matt

On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 4:50 PM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Sam and I are working on issuing a PR about the volume rendering
> refactor.  This is the last major code change to go in place for 2.4,
> pending the quad_proj changes being accepted or rejected.  I'm still
> thinking about this refine_by issue, and that might also make it in.
> After the volume_refactor, it's just testing and documentation left:
>
> https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/issues?status=new&status=open&milestone=2.4
>
> After 2.4 is released, I am going to shift my new development
> exclusively to the yt-3.0 branch, which is currently hosted here:
>
> http://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt-3.0
>
> This will include geometry refactoring and many remaining
> de-Enzoifications of the code base.  3.0 is nearing a usable state,
> but will not be ready for production for a while.  However, I think
> that allowing the codebases to diverge too rapidly will lead to
> problems: a fracturing.  So once the 3.0 codebase can muster feature
> parity with 2.x, I am going to ask that all development on the 2.x
> branch cease, and all pull requests for features and new functionality
> be applied only to the 3.0 branch.  In advance of this, I would like
> to solicit help: we've identified a number of relatively
> straightforward changes to this code base that can and should be made.
>  For instance, the changing of field names.  I'd also like to consider
> moving to a more spread-out source code layout, like one class per
> file.  Changes like these make it difficult to do cross-branch merges
> and transplants, which is why I would like to save them for after
> feature parity has been reached and development on 2.x has halted.
>
> Previous threads:
>
> http://lists.spacepope.org/pipermail/yt-dev-spacepope.org/2012-February/001852.html
> http://lists.spacepope.org/pipermail/yt-dev-spacepope.org/2012-February/001868.html
> http://lists.spacepope.org/pipermail/yt-dev-spacepope.org/2012-February/001830.html
> http://lists.spacepope.org/pipermail/yt-dev-spacepope.org/2012-March/001941.html
> http://lists.spacepope.org/pipermail/yt-dev-spacepope.org/2012-March/001949.html
>
> If anyone has any strong objections to this strategy, please reply.
>
> Estimated Timeline:
>
>  * June 26, 2.4 release
>  * July 30, 3.0 reaches rough feature parity
>  * Fall sometime: 3.0 merged into main 'yt' branch
>  * Some time after that: 3.0 released
>
> Criteria for Feature Parity:
>
>  * All patch-based AMR codes support data region selection
>  * Parallelism is functional for all parallel-capable routines
>  * All patch-based AMR codes support projections, slices, cutting planes
>  * All patch-based AMR codes support volume rendering
>  * All patch-based AMR codes support halo finding
>  * Octree-based AMR codes (RAMSES and ART) support data region selection
>  * Octree-based AMR codes (RAMSES and ART) support slices, projections
> and cutting planes
>
> If any of you are interested in helping with this reengineering
> effort, I would be extremely interested in collaborating.  My goal for
> this effort is to focus on making yt a future-compatible code, and
> changing it from an organically grown system into one that we design
> based on the years of experience we all have now had with it.
>
> -Matt