[yt-dev] Particle field generation in 3.0

[Cameron Hummels]

Hello everyone,

As I'm updating some of the documentation in 3.0 to be current on field
generation, I thought of something that might make the particle fields a
bit more clean as we build on them in the future.

As I understand it, each particle type from a given code will generate its
own namespace for those native particle quantities.  So for example a
Gadget binary dataset will read in its star, gas, and DM particles as:

('star', 'particle_mass')
('gas', 'particle_mass')
('DM', 'particle_mass')

but when these different particles are deposited and smoothed on to the
grid, they all get put into the same 'deposit' namespace:

('deposit', 'star_density')
('deposit', 'gas_density')
('deposit', 'DM_density')

It seems to me that perhaps we should create a separate deposit namespace
for each of the native particle types, so that we'll have a clean 1-to-1
conversion between native particle types and smoothed particle types in
namespaces.  Now the above fields would map to:

('deposit_star', 'density')
('deposit_gas', 'density')
('deposit_DM', 'density')

This doesn't seem like it would be hard to change in the field-generation
infrastructure, but it might break things later on, which I've just not yet
considered.  Anyway, I just wanted to bounce this off of people.  It may
not be better in the long run, but it seemed like if we're breaking API, it
should be done now instead of later on.  I may be missing something big
here, but I wanted to see what others thought.

Cameron

-- 
Cameron Hummels
Postdoctoral Researcher
Steward Observatory
University of Arizona
http://chummels.org
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