[yt-dev] Proposal: Wind down 2.X development

[Matthew Turk]

Hi all,

I'm just coming back online, but earlier this week I had the
opportunity to talk to a few people about yt -- specifically, Nathan.

There are a few disadvantages to continuing to develop in parallel:

 * Features and bug fixes don't get ported with regularity
 * Documentation is not being developed for 3.0 explicitly
 * Problems that may be present in 3.0 are not being noticed
 * New users (particularly for new codes) find themselves in a bit of
a bind with how to install

There are a few disadvantages to combining development:

 * Not everyone who uses patch-based codes has moved
 * All of the codes have not yet been ported (this is something I can do)
 * A few things do not yet work (boolean objects and clump finding come to mind)

If we do decide to move soon, there are a few things that are major
blockers which I would take on:

 * Porting the remaining codes
 * Fixing IO for spatial particle fields in patch-based codes, which
is currently a major performance bottleneck
 * Rewriting clump finding to work with 3.0

Additionally, I'd like to move all the Python3 changes and the Boxlib
refactor to yt-3.0 if we do this.

If there is support for this, I'd be happy to write this into a YTEP.
I think we could continue to provide bug fixes for 2.x and perhaps do
one more "major" release (2.6) and then only bug fixes from then on.

-Matt