[yt-dev] Consolidating Boxlib frontends

[Matthew Turk]

Hi all,

I'm spending a bit of time today looking over the Boxlib frontends and
identifying commonalities and differences.  I wanted to write with
some of my initial findings as well as some specific questions.

Casey, Andrew, and Jeff I would particularly like your feedback, but I
also intend to submit this for detailed review and collaboration.  My
general plan is to consolidate the data_structures, IO and definitions
into a single Boxlib frontend, with subclasses that cover each of the
specific differences.

The main differences I am seeing:

 * Castro was originally going to be a frontend, but morphed into the
Nyx frontend, and I don't believe anything Castro-specific is left
anymore.  I am inclined to remove it and in the future add on any
subclass-specific items when Castro comes back into the fold.
 * Nyx and Orion handle particles completely differently.
 * Nyx has optimized IO, particularly for fluids, which we should use
everywhere.
 * Some weird differences like Level_%i and Level_%02i for level filenames.
 * Units will need to be set individually.
 * Parsing the Fortran and non-Fortran parameter files (i.e., Maestro
and everyone else) will be tricky.

There were a few other things I wanted to get feed back on.

 * Is it okay to get rid of the old enzo parameter mappings?
 * Do we need to have all of the paranoid IO still?
 * Do you mind if I reword some of the names?

What do you all think?  If anybody wants to help out, I'll be in IRC
working on this for a while today, but I'll also try to submit a PR as
early as possible to iterate on and get feedback from.

-Matt