Hi all,
Could I get one or two people to look this over, and give me the
thumbs up? I applied a hotfix to the repo yesterday because of
problems during the Enzo Workshop. It was trying to create the .yt
file for every user, even though they didn't have write privs -- this
was because of an indentation error, but then I committed one that was
*also* not great (but worked to fix the workshop issues) and I have, I
think, settled upon one that works, that explores the four
conditionals (noted in the patch.)
http://paste.enzotools.org/show/857/
If I get a thumbs up, I'll commit.
-Matt
We're proud to announce the release of yt version 1.7, an analysis and
visualization toolkit for Adaptive Mesh Refinement data. (Just in
time for the Enzo Workshop!) This release fixes a number of bugs, as
well as numerous improvements to the code base and the documentation.
Most prominently, it features "two-point functions" such as structure
and correlation functions, a re-engineered volume rendering interface,
multivariate volume rendering, off-axis projections, and a mechanism
for complex postscript plot layout. Additionally, a major aspect of
the drive to 1.7 has been re-engineering the API documentation to be
better suited to interactive help (the "help(...)" call in python) as
well as the documentation website ( http://yt.enzotools.org/doc/ ).
Some of the changes since yt-1.6 (Released on January 22, 2010) include:
* Direct writing of PNGs
* Multi-band image writing
* Parallel halo merger tree
* Parallel structure function generator
* Image pan and zoom object and display widget
* Parallel volume rendering
* Multivariate volume rendering, allowing for multiple forms of
emission and absorption
* Added Camera interface to volume rendering
* Off-axis projection
* Stereo (toe-in) volume rendering
* DualEPS extension for better EPS construction
* Rewritten, memory conservative and speed-improved contour finding
algorithm
* Speed improvements to volume rendering
* Preliminary support for the Tiger code
* Lightweight projection loading with projload
* Improvements to yt.data_objects.time_series
* Improvements to yt.extensions.EnzoSimulation
* Speed improvements to basic HOP
* Better docstrings and documentation
(The full changelog: http://yt.enzotools.org/doc/changelog.html )
yt features native support for Enzo
(http://lca.ucsd.edu/projects/enzo) data, providing a natural and
intuitive way to address physical regions in space as well as
processed data.
Installation instructions can be found here:
http://yt.enzotools.org/doc/installation.html . If you are running an
older version of yt, re-obtaining and re-running the installation
script should happily upgrade your installation. yt is a Free and
Open Source project, and we invite you to get involved. For more
information, join the yt-dev mailing list, or see the hacking
guidelines on the Wiki: http://yt.enzotools.org/wiki/HackingGuidelines
. We anticipate a few more releases in the 1.7 series as
documentation and docstring coverage progress.
Sincerely,
The yt development team:
Matthew Turk
Stephen Skory
Britton Smith
John Wise
Jeff Oishi
Sam Skillman
Devin Silvia
David Collins
Hi guys,
Just a quick note about signal handling. In the past, sending SIGUSR1
to a running yt-imported python task would print the stack and SIGUSR2
would make it raise a runtime error. I've changed this behavior, so
that SIGUSR2 actually inserts an IPython session at the current
location in the running task. When the IPython session terminates
(ctrl-d) it will continue executing. This will let you do things like
modify state variables, inspect state variables, etc etc.
I haven't added a convenience function for listing the surrounding
code, but that shouldn't be too bad to do, and so if somebody wants to
take that on it'd be great. I'd suggest just adding that function
into the locals of the IPython session.
-Matt
Hi all,
I'm going to try to push out a yt-1.7 release this week before Friday.
I've added docstrings (in the form of doc/docstring_example) to the
plot collection, fixed resolution buffers, and about 1/2 of the volume
rendering stuff. I will be documenting the new volume rendering
interface and adding more docstrings, and then I'm calling 1.7 good.
John, can you put DualEPS into the main yt repo? If you have time --
and you probably don't :) -- would you mind adding docstrings for it?
Stephen, what is the status of your modifications to the docs/code?
Is there anything else that needs to happen? I would like it if we
could convert all of the docstrings to the new format, but that will
take a significant chunk of time and it shouldn't be required for 1.7.
Does anyone else have anything they think should go in?
-Matt
Hi All,
This afternoon I had some unexpected data corruption (thanks, GPFS!)
which led me to find a very odd error. I don't know if this holds true
for Enzo data anywhere, since it uses HDF5 and all, but to read Orion
data we rely on numpy's fromfile() function. It turns out that if you
seek past the end of a file, then call fromfile() on that filehandle,
it throws a MemoryError. This makes very little sense from an end-user
perspective. I was hunting through yt's source looking for some kind
of memory related error until i realized the datafile might be
corrupt. I can wrap the fromfile in a try/except statement to catch
the MemoryError, but my question to you guys is, should I file a
ticket upstream with the Numpy people? Or does this make sense and I
am simply overlooking something? Here's the simplest test case that
shows the behavior
[jsoishi@volans ~]$ touch crap
[jsoishi@volans ~]$ python -c 'import numpy; fi = open("crap");
fi.seek(100); numpy.fromfile(fi,count=10)'
10 items requested but only 0 read
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
MemoryError
Any thoughts?
j
Hi all,
A new version of pyprof2html was released:
http://www.hexacosa.net/project/pyprof2html/
It now includes function callers. This is definitely a cool piece of
software, and it is very useful for exploring profiling output.
-Matt
Hi Matt,
I think you made a couple mistakes in your conversions from kwargs in plot_collection.py. With these changes, it works for me. If you think it's OK, I'll commit and push.
http://paste.enzotools.org/show/740/
_______________________________________________________
sskory(a)physics.ucsd.edu o__ Stephen Skory
http://physics.ucsd.edu/~sskory/ _.>/ _Graduate Student
________________________________(_)_\(_)_______________
Hi all,
The case changes in Clump.py -> clump.py have caused more trouble than
I'd realized they would. I'm still in the process of working through
this issue, but I think it'll be best fixed by renaming it to
clump_handling.py, which I'm going to do...
-Matt
Hi all,
I've renamed a bunch of modules to clean up after a mistake I made a
long time ago. Fortunately, this also coincides with fixing things to
come in line with the style guide better. I'd prefer we do this in
SVN trunk, so that I don't miss any renames from applying a patch from
hg=>SVN. This was done in r
Modules that share a name with a class *have* to be renamed, otherwise
the import mechanism breaks in a number of cases, and I'm not sure I
can work around this.
Here's my list:
PlotCollection.py => plot_collection.py
FieldInfoContainer.py => field_info_container.py
ObjectFindingMixin.py => object_finding_mixing.py
Britton, can you verify these are okay:
Clump.py => clump.py
HaloProfiler.py => halo_profiler.py
EnzoSimulation.py => enzo_simulation.py
LightCone*.py => light_cone_*.py
Stephen, can you verify:
MergerTree.py => merger_tree.py
Keep in mind that all auto-generated documentation, as well as
reliable selective imports, are broken when the module is the same
name as the class. So we can rename one or the other... And I
apologize that I didn't catch any of these sooner. But I'm about 75%
done with docstrings for PlotCollection.py, and this was breaking
auto-generation of the docs.
Thanks,
Matt
Hi all,
This last Friday I had a chance to talk to Tom Abel and Oliver Hahn
(both CC'd on this message) about their experiences with using yt, and
they brought up some points which I've now had a chance to think
about, and which I find very interesting, certainly as something to
discuss. Here are my notes on it, along with a proposal for moving
forward.
As a quick note, what really hit home that we need better
documentation was trying to make a thin projection. The definition of
what a 'source' could be wasn't there, there were no examples, and I
had to go look at the source to figure out what the parameters were
even called. I think that's not ... good.
Python Inline Documentation
===========================
One of the coolest things about Python is the help() function, which
prints out the function signature and the contents of the doc string.
In the source code, the docstring is inline in the function, like so:
def some_function(a, b, c):
"""
This function does something.
"""
return a+b+c
The output of help(some_function) would look like this:
>>> help(some_function)
Help on function some_function in module __main__:
some_function(a, b, c)
This function does something.
>>>
Generated Documentation
=======================
The yt docs are generated using an extension to Sphinx called autodoc.
What this does, as you can see by going to the API docs and clicking
"view source" (which, counterintuitively, displays the doc source and
not the source code of the functions) is at documentaion build time,
pull all the docstrings from the source and render them in the
document. Ideally, we would want something that renders nicely as
well as looks good in the inline help -- and to maximize the detail
without becoming encumbering.
For most of the functions in yt that have docstrings, they have been
written in a narrative style, with parameters inside asterisks, so
that they would render nicely in the API docs:
http://yt.enzotools.org/doc/modules/amrcode.html#yt-lagos-outputtypes-outpu…
But, it's becoming clear that perhaps this is not the best approach.
I think a combination of narrative and explicit parameter declaration
would be better. The NumPy/SciPy projects have a CodingStandards
description:
http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/wiki/CodingStyleGuidelines
that covers docstrings, with a very detailed example of a completely
filled out docstring here:
http://svn.scipy.org/svn/numpy/trunk/doc/example.py
As an example, the 'tensorsolve' function is defined here:
http://svn.scipy.org/svn/numpy/trunk/numpy/linalg/linalg.py
and the API docs are here:
http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.linalg.tensorsolv…
This looks great, I think. yt is a bit more class-oriented than
NumPy, but I believe that we should strive for a similar level of
detail as well as a similar style: presenting parameters, what those
parameters can be, and a brief word on the return type.
Ideal Type Of Documentation
===========================
A few weeks ago, Tom and I were chatting and he mentioned to me a
Pascal manual. In this manual, there was a single function on every
page: a description, parameters (often repeated between functions, but
explicitly listed for each), and an example. My first Unix manual was
exactly like this, and I remember it being one of the best sets of
documentation I've ever used. I believe this is the model NumPy and
SciPy are striving for, as well.
I think this is what yt should strive for, too. One page per class or
function, with a description, parameters, and examples -- just like
mentioned above. In doing so, I think that the online help -- which
right now is sort of helpful, but not amazingly helpful, would become
much more useful.
The fact that on the mailing lists we get questions asking us about
fundamental operations in yt is, I think, an indictment of the way
it's presented. As the Enzo Workshop revs up, a couple of us will be
writing talks about using Enzo, using yt, etc, and I think this is a
time to harness that momentum to reorganize and rewrite some of the
doc strings. Of course, I would take the lead on the initial rewrite,
as I'm the one who wrote all the bad docstrings.
What does everyone think about this?
Action Items
============
(It wouldn't be a long email about procedures if we didn't use a
buzzword like 'action items' :)
Firstly: a vote and a request for comments.
Do we want to agree on the NumPy standard for docstrings? What does
everyone think about this idea, of a set of docstring guidelines, and
trying to focus on a better set of API documentation, to be used both
in generated form and inline via help()?
If we can agree on the NumPy standard, I believe that I should be able
to convert most of the docstrings with some relative ease; it's mostly
going to be a matter of typing, copy/pasting, etc. I will copy a
style guide into doc/, which will be largely taken from the NumPy
style guide, but I will additionally add a document with examples for
common strings: I would prefer we have a single, consistent manner for
referring to things like AMR3DData as a source, for instance. I will
then go through and convert all the doc strings that I am familiar
with. This would leave us with three files:
* Example docstring, which can be read in verbatim and edited.
* List of yt idioms for cross-referencing and describing things.
* File describing this standard, largely pulling from the NumPy standard.
The next thing will be, going forward, how do we ensure that the doc
strings are correctly inserted with new code? I am more guilty of
this than I would care to admit (I sometimes fall into the camp of
thinking that functions with well-named parameters are
self-documenting, which is probably a mistake!) but I think having
someone agree to review incoming changesets for documentation updates,
and then to email the committer if they do not have a sufficient
docstring. My inclination is to suggest that someone who already
reviews incoming changesets to do this, which I think means either me,
Sam or Stephen. Sam, would you be willing to take this on? It should
be relatively straightforward.
Additionally, would anyone volunteer to help me out with rewriting
some of the existing docstrings? In particular, for code you have
contributed?
The End
=======
I think that if we really take the docstrings seriously, then the
documentation on the whole will vastly improve. I am in the process
of rewriting some sections, removing the old-style tutorial and trying
to better walk the user through the process of getting up and running.
The current documentation has a lot of information, but it's not very
good at getting people up and running in anything other than the most
simple manner. I think that getting started on improving the
docstrings will also help refocus efforts toward better documentation
on the whole. And, I'd like to end by admitting culpability for the
sorry state of the docstrings we currently have. But I think this
might be good, in the long run, because it'll help out with getting us
on track for a better code that's much easier to use!
And finally, thanks to Tom and Oliver for taking the time to chat with
me about this -- I really appreciate their thoughtful feedback on
this.
Best,
Matt
