[yt-dev] Soliciting opinions about how to handle data tables for spectral integrator port

[John Zuhone]

Hi everyone,

I just issued PR 2465 (https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/pull-requests/2465/wip-port-the-spectral_integrator-analysis/) to port the spectral integrator analysis module (originally written by Britton) under yt.fields. spectral_integrator is an analysis module that creates X-ray emission fields in user-specified energy bands.

The hitch is that spectral_integrator uses HDF5 tables to compute the emissivity, since they are not analytical functions. We currently host those tables on yt-project.org/data. spectral_integrator downloads them automatically if the analysis module is used and they are not present.

There was some discussion on Slack as to whether or not this is the correct approach, since it’s not ideal for certain computing environments (e.g., HPC). The files are a total of about 2.4 MB in size, so there is some reticence to bundling them with yt.

There is also the issue that uploading new versions of the tables breaks backward-compatibility. I have sacrificed backwards-compatiblity for considerable simplification of code.

Does anyone have any ideas about the best way to handle this issue?

Best,

John Z
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