[yt-dev] proposal for merging in the unitrefactor and rebranding

[Britton Smith]

Hi all,

There are two major changes coming soon for yt-3.0 as we march our way to
an official release.  These are the unitrefactor and the rebranding.  The
unitrefactor adds symbolically expressed, convertible units to all fields
and scalars in yt.  The rebranding is a rethinking of some of yt's
conceptual entities (such as thinking of a "dataset" instead of a
"parameter file", an "indexer" instead of a "hierarchy", etc.) and attempt
to de-astro the infrastructure as we start to think about working with
other sciences.  The unitrefactor also contains some rebranding efforts in
the form of field renaming (e.g., "Density" becoming "density"), so these
changes are somewhat linked.

What we need to figure out is the process by which these changes are merged
into the yt-3.0 branch of the main repo (yt_analysis).  In my opinion, the
primary issues are the following:

1. Develop is cumbersome because it is taking place within Matt's fork,
meaning that all contributors have to fork his fork and issue PRs to that.
 This is annoying because one has to maintain two forks and because most
people aren't getting notified of PRs issued to Matt's fork.

2. Experience has shown that the only way to identify all the bugs is by
actually attempting to use the code to do Real Stuff.  What this means is
we need all the frontends represented and people putting the various
functionality and analysis modules to use.  I think for most people, having
to pull changes in from an external repo and perform various mercurial
magic just to test changes is a bridge to far.  We need to lower the
barrier to entry.

3. There is still a good amount of documentation, testing, polishing, etc
before this can be called stable.  Even though yt-3.0 is still officially
Under Development, a number of people are using it to do actual things and
so it is unreasonable to just land this on them without full documentation
and with such a high likelihood that it will break things.

*I propose that the unitrefactor and rebranding work be pulled into the
main repository in an "experimental" bookmark.*  I think this will a)
streamline development and make it more visible to everyone, b) lower the
barrier to trying it out for people so we can actually get everything
tested and working, and c) not disrupt the workflow of the current users of
yt-3.0.  I also think this is the quickest way of satisfying everyone in
terms of getting all of the necessary documentation written as it makes the
development significantly more open and accessible.

For more info on what needs to be done on both of these fronts and for
yt-3.0 in general, see the trello boards: https://trello.com/yt_analysis

Can we get a +/-1 on this?

Britton
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