We’d love your contributions to yt!
yt is designed to be accessible to contributions, of both enhancements to the core packages and the library of recipes and scripts for performing common – and not-so-common – tasks. The yt dev community is growing, and we’re eager to have newcomers on board.
On the main Wiki page, `some guidelines http://yt.enzotools.org/wiki/GettingInvolved`_ have been left to help you on your way to adding code, contributing modules, and helping out.
There are lots of places in yt where new extensions could be added, or new functionality put in place. Here are a few.
yt strives to be a general-purpose analysis tool for astrophysical data. To that end, we’d like to short up our support for codes besides Enzo, as well as ensure that the other codes we support – Orion, Tiger, etc – are well-supported.
`A page has been set up http://yt.enzotools.org/wiki/AddingSupportForANewCode`_ on the Trac site to describe the method of adding support for a new code to yt. Please feel free to use it as a reference, but if you would like some assistance, drop a line to one of the mailing lists (see The Mailing List) for more help.
The 1.7 release adds some functionality for interactive exploration of data, but this could be greatly expanded. In particular, the volume rendering could be converted to a hardware based volume renderer (some simple sketches of this exist in the mercurial repository), the VTK interface could be improved, and the various components that form the interface for examining data could be integrated.
The functionality to construct simulated observations is an end goal for yt. Transforming simulation output into mock observations is the Stanley Cup.
If you have simple bug fixes, please feel free to attach them to a ticket on the bug tracker (you might have to register first) or to email them to one of the developers directly. We’re always happy to hear about the things we’ve done wrong, and how you’ve fixed them!
All contributed code must be GPL-compatible; we ask that you consider licensing under the GPL version 3, but we will consider submissions of code that are BSD-like licensed as well. If you’d rather not license in this manner, but still want to contribute, just drop me a line and I’ll put a link on the main wiki page to wherever you like!
yt comes with a bunch of derived fields. However, if you have constructed some that add interesting analysis quantities, please feel free to send them to one of the developers!
Additionally, if you have a sub-module that extends yt in a fun or exciting way, we’d be very happy to include it. Recently we’ve added light cone generators, halo profilers, and work is even ongoing on a parallel halo finder!
Because yt can be a bit difficult to become fully acquainted with, we encourage you to share your analysis scripts. Specifically, we will provide you with free repository space to store any analysis scripts that went into the writing of a paper. Through this, we hope to build up a library not only of usage-cases, but of real-world examples of plot generation and data analysis.
If you are interested in submitting your scripts, please contact Matt Turk at matthewturk@gmail.com.