[yt-dev] 2.5 release next Thursday

[Matthew Turk]

Hi all,

Okay, after a discussion in IRC about releasing 2.5, we've decided to
just start pushing ahead.  I'd like to propose ([+-][01]) that we set
a hard cutoff of a week from today, Valentine's day.  If anything
doesn't make it in, that's fine.  We just put out a release without it
and wrap it up in 2.6.  (Yeah, we probably need a 2.6.)

The remaining blockers:

 * I want Andrew's pull request to make it in.  This is a huge win for
everyone.  Once it's in, we can add documentation about it, and then
it'll be a big feature.
 * John ZuHone has an outstanding piece of code that builds Enzo data
from in-memory hierarchies.  I would like to see this make it in, but
it is worth a release all by itself.
 * The remaining tickets are mostly all documentation based.  We need:
bootcamp in the docs, rotation information in the docs,
offaxisprojection in the docs.
 * We have a need for answer testing for Orion, FLASH, NYX and
optionally GDF datasets.  I have been the bottleneck here.  If you
have pinged me in the past, ping me again and I will do this with you.
 If we don't get to this by 14th, this will be bumped.

However: after 2.5 goes out, I would like for us to stop doing *major*
features on the 2.x branch and try to focus on 3.0.  This may not be
possible for all things, but I would like to try to push for that.  At
a bare minimum, every new feature in 2.6 should be well-tested enough
that we can run those tests on 3.0 to determine if it is directly
portable.  And future-compatible requirements will be in place for new
features in 2.6.

Also, I'd like to nominate John ZuHone to send out the release
announcement, particularly since he has worked so hard to put together
initial conditions generation in this release.

-Matt