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

John ZuHone jzuhone at gmail.com
Wed Mar 12 07:39:19 PDT 2014


+1

On Mar 12, 2014, at 9:11 AM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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