[yt-dev] Summary of a yt sprint

[Nathan Goldbaum]

Hi all,

I'm excited for how things are shaping up.  If you haven't yet, you may want to try pulling in the changes from Matt's PR and check out the new interface.

I'm particularly excited about the 3d scene viewer (which is still a bit rough in places, unfortunately), I think we'll be able to come up with a lot of cool functionality that will significantly ease the pain of producing nice-looking volume renderings. 

> Perhaps Nathan would be better at describing this, but he's now
> implemented a mechanism (built on Jeff's initial design) for
> generating nice plots easily and complex plots straightforwardly.
> This was discussed here:
> 
> http://lists.spacepope.org/pipermail/yt-dev-spacepope.org/2012-June/002111.html
> 
> Nathan, anything you wanted to add?


If you haven't seen, I shared an example from the new top-level plotting functions on google+:

https://plus.google.com/109002259194298035269/posts/PJ8xqVfJuq3

I also just pushed some docstrings for the new plotting functions.  It would be great if you could try to use the new plotting interface in favor of PlotCollection in new scripts, and please let me know if there are bugs I need to fix or use-cases I didn't anticipate.

I think I'd like to make it so 'yt plot' on the command line interface uses the new plotting tools, but I'll hold off if there are objections.  I didn't get a chance to take a look at Matt's ProfilePlotter, but hopefully we can come up with a way to integrate that into the new plotting interface.

Once the all the new plotting functions can do everything PlotCollection does now, which will require porting over all of the existing plot callbacks, I'm strongly in favor of deprecating PlotCollection.  It should be left in any yt 2.X releases for backward compatibility, but we should try to emphasize the new plotting interface in the docs and maybe even throw a DeprecationWarning if a script tries to use it.  +/- 1?

I'm Looking forward to releasing all this awesome code sometime soon :)

-Nathan