[yt-dev] PR to remove reason

[Matthew Turk]

Hi Nathan,

This PR makes me really, really sad.

The first version of Reason, back in 2007, was a wxPython GUI that
basically Britton and I worked on.  Then there were a few other
iterations, and finally this one, Reason v5 ("Cinco Analysis
Generator") was a joint effort (lots of effort from Cameron), written
in ExtJS 3.  There were two big components -- the python backend, and
the javascript frontend.  This was the one that got presented at the
yt workshop in Chicago.  Midway through 2012 I spent a bunch of time
refactoring this to work with Ext JS 4 (the current layout of the
javascript, along with the current javascript, is largely fully
refactored and much of it rewritten from the ExtJS 3 code) and this
was more extensible, with pluggable widgets and so on in an easier,
more defined way.

Of the various components, the Python portion is definitely the part
that would need the most work to maintain, and also is probably the
one that would be the most unwise to maintain.  The ExtJS4 stuff,
which is in principle not impossible to maintain, should probably be
let go, as much as it pains me.  It's a nice framework, and I'm proud
of what it is, but it's heavyweight and very project specific.  It
could be made much more generic ... but first we'd have to maintain
it.  And I think that while the JS is likely not too hard to maintain
in stasis at this point, the Python code would be a pain.
Theoretically we could swap out the Python execution backend for
Jupyter (basing it on something like the way Thebe operates) but I'm
not sure the overall value there for us.

That's not to say there isn't a set of lessons we can learn, but this
was a big push, and I think maybe in the end larger projects with more
resources and expertise should be utilized, rather than going it
ourselves on this (thinking here of Jupyter).  I'm okay with it going.
I guess.

-Matt

On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 3:43 PM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've opened a pull request to remove the reason GUI here:
>
> https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/pull-requests/1719
>
> As I mentioned in my e-mail a couple weeks ago about cleaning up the
> codebase, most of the functionality provided by reason is currently
> disabled. It could be re-enabled, but someone would need to commit to
> maintaining it and go through the work of updating the python side of things
> to work with the current state of yt.
>
> If anyone is invested in the reason gui and thinks my pull request is not
> the way to go, please feel free to comment on the pull request so we can
> start a discussion about what to do.
>
> Thanks for your time,
>
> -Nathan
>
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