[yt-dev] Finishing up the 2.4 release

[Matthew Turk]

Hi Nathan,

Thanks for the summary email.

On Sat, Jul 28, 2012 at 6:37 PM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey everybody,
>
> I hope you're all enjoying your weekend and don't mind taking some time out
> of it to think about yt.
>
> Right now there are only three open tickets for the 2.4 release:
>
> 1. The entropy field in non-enzo data
> 2. Transfer function bounds

I spent some time yesterday morning trying to reproduce this and I was
not successful.  I noted this in my ticket comment:

https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/issue/390/transfer-function-bounds

I think the problem Sam described when he opened it can be fixed by
using the f64clip function when evaluating the transfer function
inside grid_traversal.pyx.  I have avoided this in the past because it
adds a considerable slowdown (10% last I looked) and I was hoping we
might find a better way to do it.  What neds up happening is you
interpolate off the ends of the table.

> 3. Volume rendering docs
>
> I think these tickets are things that are fixable on a short timescale.
> Sam, please let us know if you need more time or help with the volume
> rendering docs.

If Sam has too much going on this week, I can also try to address this
one.  I think the only thing I can't cover is how to handle
opaque/semi-opaque surfaces.

>
> We've put a lot of time into updating the cookbook and making sure the
> scripts produce good-looking images based on a variety of datasets.  The
> latest version of the docs is available here:
> http://yt-project.org/docs/2.4/
>
> I'm curious how everyone feels about setting a time aside sometime this week
> to do the official release.  I think the release will attract more eyeballs
> if we can point to screencasts about some of the new functionality,
> including (but not limited to, see the changelog
> <http://yt-project.org/docs/2.4/changelog.html#version-2-4> for the full
> [really extensive and impressive] list of changes):
>
> 1. Threaded volume renderer
> 2. Plot window
> 3. Improved time series analysis
> 4. Improved extjs4 reason
> 5. The new yt hub
>
> I'm planning on doing a plot window screencast this afternoon. Does anyone
> else want to claim one of the features?

I'll do a screencast about the hub.  I still intend to come up with a
slide show showing highlights, and the screencasts would fit very
nicely into that.

>
> Lastly, I contacted Kelle Cruz at astrobetter about going a guest post about
> the yt 2.4 release.  She is interested - all she needs from us is a google
> doc with a draft of the post, including text embedded videos, and urls.  I'm
> going to begin the write up sometime this week and then share the google doc
> on the yt-dev list so that others can contribute.
>
> The end is in sight!  This will be by far the best release of yt yet :)

I agree.  Looking at the churn statistics, we've had (to date) 1091
revisions between the branch point of yt-2.3 and the current tip:

hg churn -c -r "tip:ancestor(tip, 'yt-2.3')" | awk '{SUM += $2} ; END
{PRINT $SUM}'

Looking over the changes, the theme that stands out to me is just how
focused this release was on taking things that were either outdated or
broken, and fixing them.  And then on top of that, layering higher
performance and more capable functionality.  As many of you probably
know, I'm somewhat ambivalent about focusing on version numbers and
release schemes.  But I think in this case, it will serve a very
useful purpose of sharing with the community where development has
led.  I'm pretty pleased with that, and I think everyone who
contributed (and 20 people contributed patches or changesets for this
release) has something to be proud of.

-Matt

>
> Cheers,
>
> Nathan
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