fenics team mailing list archive

[Anders Logg <logg@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 10:24:11AM +0100, Martin Sandve Alnæs wrote:
> On 31 October 2011 07:26, Johan Hake <johan.hake@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Sunday October 30 2011 22:23:42 Ridgway Scott wrote:
> >> Maybe we should talk about Andy's comments at the FEniCS meeting
> >> this week in Lubbock.
> >
> > That would be great. But unfortunately not all of us will be there, me
> > included.
>
> Me neither, but the feedback will be welcome, so please send us a summary :)
>
> > I would also appreciate a bit more details about the nature and content of
> > such claims. Obviously it is not very tempting to stand out and raise such
> > claims directly on a list, but it is difficult to do anything about it if that
> > is not done.
>
> It would be interesting to know if their problems are basically the
> same issues we know about and try to address, or something that we do
> not see from the "inside".

Yes.

> I think we are in general agreement on the main cooperative challenges:
> - The interface has been changing too much too often, this will
> hopefully stabilize now, and we will support 1.0 and fix its bugs for
> a while.

Remember that one of the motivations for the many changes has been to
get all those changes in place before 1.0 so that we don't need to
change the interface after 1.0. I'm very happy with the current
interface and don't foresee any big changes in the near future. We
also have a quite extensive set of unit tests that check that *all*
code examples in the Tutorial and DOLFIN chapters in the book will
continue to run.

> - With the new development plan we try to make the release process less chaotic.
>
> As for wanting users, the rapid interface changes may have been a
> problem, but otherwise I think:

My impression is that we have just the number of users that we want
and deserve at the moment. It would have been a problem to have 10x
more users. Now that 1.0 is (almost) here, I think we are ready for
more users (and developers).

> - Our response time on questions is low, but we do require that the
> questions make sense.
> - We accept patches regularly, but do require that they are in a
> good state.

I think the Launchpad system has good support for contributions. It's
easy to publish new branches and make merge requests and easy to
review and merge those branches.

> - With the fenics book we have tried hard to make the software well documented.

Yes.

--
Anders