[yt-dev] 2.4: Release and bug roundup

[Matthew Turk]

Hi all,

A couple people have mentioned to me recently (in IRC and over email)
that the stable branch is missing some fixes for FLASH and Enzo data.
I'd like to start a discussion on wrapping up the dev cycle and moving
for a 2.4 release.  The showpoint of this release I believe will be
improvements to volume rendering; more on that below.

Here are the open, targeted bugs for 2.4:

https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/issues?status=new&status=open&milestone=2.4

These touch on a few major areas:

 * Minor improvements to reason and reason widgets: Adding vectors,
layers (which should get postponed) a volume rendering widget (should
get postponed) and a file open dialog (Nathan had been working a bit
on that.)
 * FLASH updates to make it more user friendly: John Z and I had a
brainstorming session after I spoke to some FLASH users last week, and
I filled out tickets to try to address any remaining weak points.
 * Time Series updates: Nathan has made a few suggestions, and I'm
going to implement them.  I like where Time Series is going!
 * Volume rendering refactor (Sam, if you have a few minutes, could
you give an update on what that includes and what it provides?  This
could be a great centerpiece of 2.4!)
 * Rockstar integration is incomplete and undocumented, but that may
also be postponed.

There are also a few bugs that need to be addressed:

 * MPI attributes now break pickling in some cases; I will address this
 * Ghost zone issues seem to be everywhere, as corner cases keep
coming up.  John W and I have spoken about this and we have an idea
for how to fix it moving forward.
 * Quadproj scales poorly, but that'll be a bit of a tricky piece of work.

Does anyone have any comments or ideas about these bugs, or want to
tackle any of them?  Are there any other concerns, or thoughts on
this?

How would aiming to release in a month from now sound?  April 16 is a
Monday, which would be a good day for a release.

-Matt