Hi everyone, We're proud to announce the second ALPHA release of yt 3.0. yt has recently transitioned to a time-based release plan ( https://ytep.readthedocs.org/en/latest/YTEPs/YTEP-0008.html ) and this is the second scheduled alpha of 3.0. No date for a "final" release has yet been set. The yt 2.5 codebase, and further updates in the 2.x series, will be supported for a considerable amount of time and you do not need to upgrade. = yt 3.0?! = yt 3.0 represents a new direction forward for yt: getting rid of all the underlying assumptions that data needs to be sectioned off into nice little grid patches. This includes supporting Octree codes natively (NMSU-ART and RAMSES), eventual support for SPH codes, and even opaque data structures where the data is extremely large (ARTIO). We're even planning support for natively handling cylindrical and spherical coordinates. More: http://blog.yt-project.org/post/WhatsUpWith30.html However, this *is* an alpha release. Not all of the existing codes have been ported to 3.0. Additionally, this release benefits from the technical and non-technical contributions from many new people. yt is developed in the context of a community of contributors, and with the push toward a new architecture, we aim to expand that community considerably. In particular, this release has considerably benefited from contributions from many new individuals. = Getting It! = To try out yt 3.0, you can now pull from the main yt repository, update to the yt-3.0 branch, and rebuild your extensions. Or, if you would like to create a new, safely sectioned off environment, simply re-run the normal "development" install script after changing the variable BRANCH to "yt-3.0". If you would like to try out yt 3.0 and are having trouble, please write to the yt-users mailing list for assistance. The yt 3.0 install script may also work, which can be obtained by executing these commands: wget http://hg.yt-project.org/yt/raw/yt-3.0/doc/install_script.sh bash install_script.sh = Examples = New functionality can be seen in IPython notebooks available on the yt data Hub. In particular, these notebooks demonstrate many of the functionality that has been added for PKDgrav, Gasoline, Gadget, Enzo, and RAMSES. * Enzo: https://hub.yt-project.org/nb/tzeizy * Gadget: https://hub.yt-project.org/nb/abu5nb * RAMSES: https://hub.yt-project.org/nb/5zw7qn * PKDgrav: https://hub.yt-project.org/nb/mp46a6 * Gasoline: https://hub.yt-project.org/nb/dfncvy (Apologies for the SSL warning on the Hub site.) = Reporting Problems = If you test out yt 3.0 we want to hear if it DID or DID NOT work! Feedback is crucial at this time. yt-users and yt-dev are both good forums for discussion, asking questions, and reporting problems. Lots of things have changed on the backend, but we have attempted to minimize the user-facing changes. To report a bug please go here: https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt/issues/new Note that you will not receive updates if you are not logged in when you create the bug. = What's Next? = The next alpha release (3.0a3) is scheduled to be released on July 15, 2013, but development can be monitored either at http://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/yt-3.0 or in the main yt repository under the named branch "yt-3.0". We hope to have ready for inclusion additional improvements to Octree codes, a units implementation for arrays, a field naming scheme overhaul, and further robustness for particle codes. We also are hoping to include the first attempts to apply SPH smoothing kernels to SPH particles. We anticipate that the next alpha release will involve more invasive changes to the array handling and units handling code, and may include a large number of field renaming operations. Aliases to old fields will be provided at that time. Many bug fixes from the mainline of 2.X development have not been merged into the yt-3.0 repository. Bringing these bugfixes in will occur sometime in the next few weeks. If you'd like to participate in yt development, please stop by #yt on irc.freenode.net ( http://yt-project.org/irc.html ) or yt-dev ( http://lists.spacepope.org/listinfo.cgi/yt-dev-spacepope.org ), or submit a pull request on BitBucket. Thanks very much, Matt, on behalf of the yt development team