fenics team mailing list archive

[David Ham <David.Ham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Martin,

We're not amazingly happy about that idea.

The design of FEniCS as I understand it provides a series of tools
which *can* be used in conjunction but need not be. In particular, our
toolchain (which currently revels in the name flop.py) employs UFL,
FFC, FIAT and Instant, but not UFC or Dolfin (since we employ PyOP2
and Fluidity in those roles). Merging the repositories would give us a
de facto Dolfin dependency which we don't need. It also more generally
undermines the stand-alone nature of these tools and undermines the
idea that these are generic tools which might usefully be used by
solvers other than Dolfin (eg the UFL Dune project we heard about a
while back).

I am also concerned that having them all in the same repository would
tempt people to break tool orthogonality by introducing
cross-dependencies which are not necessary but might appear convenient
to the coder at the time. This would potentially turn a de facto
dependency into a real one and could really make our life hard.

Regards,

David

On 6 February 2013 15:43, Martin Sandve Alnæs <martinal@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Whether to merge all fenics projects into one repository was discussed
> offline in january, my tests of today show that it is definitely feasible.
>
> Before we eventually do that, we should allow some time for people to
> foresee eventual issues, e.g. we'll need changes to the buildbot, which
> projects should be included, etc.
>
> The blueprint interface is not really a good place to discuss, as it doesn't
> handle concurrent access by multiple users, so chip in on this thread if you
> have anything to say.
>
> Here's a summary of pros and cons:
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/fenics/+spec/combine-projects-into-one-repository
> including a link to an already merged repository prototype and a script to
> create it.
>
> Martin



-- 
Dr David Ham
Department of Computing
Imperial College London

http://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/david.ham