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

[Matthew Turk]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 9:05 AM, Britton Smith <brittonsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

+1, for all of these reasons.

I'm really keen to get things merged in, but nervous -- for the
reasons you note.

-Matt

>
> Britton
>
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