[yt-dev] My yt roadmap for next few months

[Matthew Turk]

Hi all,

I wanted to update everyone on where things stand on my end, now that
I am back online.  These are the yt-specific issues I am targeting for
the next few weeks or months:

Short term:

 * Reliability and resiliency of yt 3.0.  This includes things like
error checking, failure modes, and so on.  Currently, there are a
number of ways to simply fail during loading of datasets like RAMSES,
Gadget, etc, and I want to fix that.
 * Other showstopping 3.0 stuff (specifically ARTIO stuff and other
Oct/Particle changes)
 * Narrative notebooks regarding 3.0 usage
 * IO enhancements for patch-based codes

Medium term:

 * Substantial effort on unit tests throughout the 3.0 codebase
 * SPH smoothing, which includes a) generalizing octrees to enable >2
zones in each direction b) searching for neighbor particles at level >
L and c) generalizing the smoothing functions sufficiently to enable
greater fleixbility for application of kernels and neighbor particle
selection.  (n.b., a working preliminary smoothing implementation can
be found in my "smoothing" bookmark, but it has a way to go!)
 * Some solicitations of community input, specifically as related to
"code liasons" and addressing issues of branding (i.e., "analysis"
over "viz") and reaching out into specific simulation code communities
(for some of our flagship codes, we're not even mentioned on the code
website!)
 * Concluding the BSD relicense
 * Diving into the unit handling system from Nathan & Casey

Things I cannot prioritize at the moment, but which I have not forgotten:

 * Narrative docs for 3.0 (docstrings will continue to be added)
 * Boxlib refactor
 * Python 3 support (the only remaining task is to change how our
metaclasses are handled, which I am somewhat reluctant to do; we may
simply want to use a more advanced 2to3-type converted)
 * Clump finding in 3.0
 * Cactus data

-Matt