Hi all, I visited Simula this week and yesterday we had a very informal "developers meeting". Here are some preliminary notes from the meeting. Since not everyone was there (or even knew about the meeting), let's continue the discussion here on the mailing list.
For the future, it might be good to arrange regular meetings via Google Hangout or similar. Here are the issues we discussed: * Release We haven't made a release in a long time and 1.5 is overdue. My view is that we can make a release whenever the buildbots are green unless we know something important will soon be fixed. (If it gets fixed later, we can always make a new release then.) I also think we should aim for a predictable release schedule. The proposed release schedule is twice per year: 15 jun + 15 dec. These are natural dates (end of term) and it works fine with the Ubuntu release schedule. We get started right away with a release of 1.5 on 15 dec. Note that this does not mean we can't make a release any other time we feel like it, just that we get at least two releases per year on predictable dates. I would also suggest that we appoint a "release manager", who is twice a year responsible for reminding everyone that a release is approaching and it's time to fix bugs... Any volunteers? Martin? Chris? * Tests We discussed the tests in DOLFIN taking a long time to run. With the new work on pytest, the quicktest is actually pretty quick (after JIT) so this may no longer be a big issue, but we should make further effort to reduce the runtime of the tests. * Documentation The documented demos need to be revised and improved, and some kind of categorization is needed. Right now they are presented in a "random" (alphabetical) order. The suggestion is to add tags to all demos (in some formatted comment) so that a Python script can generate a list for the web page with demos for different categories, like PDE, mesh, boundary condition, meshfunction, parallel, parameters etc etc. Note that each demo can have several tags. Other useful tags that Garth suggested are "beginner", "intermediate", "advanced". * Installation We have several ways to install FEniCS but the web page does not reflect all possible options, and perhaps misses out completely on the best options. The suggestion is that Johannes will (again) post instructions for how to build FEniCS with hashdist. Then we all commit to give hashdist a try and think about how we can smooth any sharp corners. If this works out well, hashdist would be a candidate for being listed as a/the official installation process for FEniCS. * Recipes / howto There is need for a collection of user recipes for doing stuff with FEniCS. This can be both "How to build FEniCS on Mac using HomeBrew" or "How to set initial data for a mixed system". The suggestion is here to use the FEniCS QA and encourage everyone to submit their best recipes and tagging this by either "recipe" or "howto". (We can vote on what is the best tag.) Using the QA means recipes can be voted up or down and commented on and the database can grow organically. -- Anders _______________________________________________ fenics mailing list [email protected] http://fenicsproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fenics
