[yt-users] Package reorganization

[Matthew Turk]

Hi there,

After talking it over with some of the other developers, it is
becoming increasingly clear that YT is getting a bit unwieldy in its
current organization scheme.  Over the next couple months we're going
to explore new ways to lay out the package structure, which will
ultimately result in something with names that might have more meaning
to a user, rather than the (admittedly) obtuse names that make up
subpackages as they stand right now.  (I honestly do not foresee any
changes in the near future -- it is rather more likely that any
changes would occur sometime in late December or mid-January.)

To that end, I am writing to encourage everyone to start using (or
continue using, if you already are) the following idiom for gaining
access to YT:

--
from yt.mods import *
--

This will import into your local namespace all of the main objects one
typically needs within YT, as well as the (current) subpackages
'lagos' and 'raven.'  This idiom will be *future compatible*, and as
such if you are using it now, your scripts should not have to be
changed once we reorganize.  Of course the 'iyt' entry point will be
updated appropriately.

The reason for the change is a happy one -- we are currently getting
more and more contributions, of both analysis pipelines and new means
of data exploration.  Right now, the import structure is rather
sticky, which makes it difficult to import individual subpackages as
well as deal with cross-subpackage imports, but with a suitable
reorganization this will be addressable.  (We're looking at lightcone
generation, halo analysis, profiling of finely-grained timeseries
data, rotating slice movies, and on and on.)  Dealing with this
head-on will help facilitate future contributions.

So, the summary: tons of cool stuff is coming (from inside and outside
of the main dev team) and to accommodate that stuff, we'll have to
move some things around, but if you use "from yt.mods import *" you
should be set.

I definitely welcome any comments or suggestions!

-Matt