[Yt-dev] yt-1.5 release

[Matthew Turk]

Hi everyone,

Although I'm sure it's mostly dropped off everyone's radar, the yt-1.5
release will happen in the next few days; even though the community is
small, and it's a niche thing, I want to put a stamp on SOMEthing and
say, hey, this is Sort Of Done.  This is also a good reason to email
the lists and bring up that the docs have been rewritten and that
development is still ongoing -- and it also is a good time to start
doing the reorganization and cruft cleaning the source tree so
desperately needs.

I'm leaning toward releasing Friday if possible, Tuesday if not.  The
docs have been almost completely rewritten, there's a whole new
cookbook there and online, lots of bugs have been fixed, the
docstrings are ready, and we're now shipping Stephen's parallel HOP
(v1.0) and Britton's lightcone and halo profiling extensions.  The
docs now also have comments, the methods section of my thesis, and
better narrative documentation with better structure for the API
documentation.

I'm sending this email out to show the release announcement and the
new docs and get feedback/comments from everyone before they go out.
I'd prefer if you didn't leave comments on the site just yet, because
the URLs are still in flux, and instead either reply to this message
or email me privately.  I am going to spend a little bit of time
tomorrow also adding in more cross-references to the methods section,
which should be peppered throughout.

The new docs can be found here:

http://yt.enzotools.org/newdoc  (pdf, 172 pages, several
artifacts&problems: http://yt.enzotools.org/yt_manual.pdf )

and the release announcement is here:

--
yt Version 1.5 Release Announcement

We're proud to announce the release of yt version 1.5, an analysis and
visualization toolkit for Adaptive Mesh Refinement data.  yt features
native support for Enzo (http://lca.ucsd.edu/projects/enzo/) data,
providing a natural and intuitive way to address physical regions in
space as well as processed data.  Version 1.5 features many new
improvements, most prominently that of the addition of parallel
computing abilities and generalization for multiple AMR data formats.
Additional improvements include:

    * Fully rewritten documentation, featuring a new cookbook with
downloadable recipes and commenting facilities
    * Fully parallel slices, projections, cutting planes, profiles, quantities
    * Parallel HOP halo finder
    * Friends-of-friends halo finder
    * Object storage and serialization
    * Major performance improvements to the clump finder (factor of five)
    * Generalized domain sizes
    * Generalized field info containers
    * Dark Matter-only simulation support
    * 1D and 2D simulation support
    * Better IO for HDF5 sets
    * Support for the Orion AMR code
    * Spherical re-gridding of data
    * Automated halo profiler and imager
    * Limited non-axially aligned projection support ("disk stacking")
    * Light cone generator
    * Callback interface improved
    * Several new plot overlay callbacks
    * New data objects -- ortho and non-ortho rays, limited ray-tracing
    * Fixed resolution buffers
    * Spectral integrator for CLOUDY data
    * Substantially better interactive interface
    * Performance improvements *everywhere*
    * Command-line interface to *many* common tasks
    * Isolated plot handling, independent of PlotCollections


Installation instructions, documentation, recipes, mailing list info
and assorted other items can be found at the website,
http://yt.enzotools.org/.

This release is the product of a year of work by the development team,
and we are very proud of the results and happy with what we have to
offer.  Thanks very much!

Sincerely,

The yt development team:
  Matthew Turk
  Britton Smith
  Jeff Oishi
  Stephen Skory
  Sam Skillman
  Devin Silvia
  John Wise
  David Collins
--

Thoughts on either the announcement or the documentation, or, heck,
even the yt-1.5 codebase?  (branches/yt-1.5)

Thanks!

-Matt