[yt-users] Announcing the yt-3.0 experimental version

[Britton Smith]

Greetings,

We have been working on some exciting new features that will be appearing
soon in the bleeding edge of yt, known as yt-3.0.  For those of you that
don't know, yt-3.0 is a complete redesign of the underlying machinery to
more flexible, less astronomy-specific, and to better support more
simulation codes, such as Gadget.  yt-3.0 is currently in alpha, and is
available as the "bleeding edge" install from the yt website.  For those of
you more familiar with mercurial, we have also put a "development" bookmark
on this version.

In addition to this development version, we have now also added an
"experimental" bookmark.  This is where brand new features will go while
they get their final polish from additional testing and documentation.  The
experimental version now contains two very interesting new features:

1. *Symbolic Units*
All numeric values in yt are now aware of their units.  Units are expressed
symbolically, so for example, a density can be in "g/cm**3" or
"Msun/Mpc**3", or any combination of a mass unit and three inverse length
units.  Nathan Goldbaum has put together an excellent tutorial of the new
units system which can be found
here<http://ngoldbaum.net/docs_build/analyzing/units/index.html>
.

With this functionality also comes an effort to generalize field names.
 For example, the "Density" field should now be accessed as either
"density" or ("gas", "density").  The second example is a step toward
supporting multifluid codes.  Additionally, we have restructured some of
the machinery to make it more intuitive.  For example, data containers like
"sphere", which were previously accessible as pf.h.sphere, can now also be
accessed as pf.sphere.

2. *Halo Analysis*
This is a new framework for analyzing cosmological halos that will replace
the separate HaloFinder, HaloProfiler, and other halo analysis tools.  This
is significantly more flexible than the existing halo analysis and will
make custom analysis much easier.  For more information, see the enhancement
proposal <http://ytep.readthedocs.org/en/latest/YTEPs/YTEP-0012.html>.

WE NEED YOUR HELP!
While these features have received a decent amount of testing, more is
necessary, especially for the new unit system.  We particularly need to
make sure the unit system works properly with all the simulation codes.
 Also, documentation is being created for these features now, but it would
be very helpful to get additional feedback.  The documentation for yt-3.0
can be found here <http://yt-project.org/docs/dev-3.0/>.  Please let us
know what you think!

To install the experimental version, all you have to do is go into your yt
source and do the following:
hg pull
hg up experimental
python setup.py develop

We hope you like these new features and are grateful for feedback.

Britton
on behalf of the yt development team.
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