[mesa-users] Git and mesa packaging

[Rob.Farmer]

Hi

I can give you some advice from the git side of things as i recently did a check out of mesa using git svn.

1) You'll need a long time, it took me several working days to get a full copy as git svn has to check out every version of the code, unless you only want a shallow copy
2) You'll need plenty of temporary hard drive space, the whole repo is ~8.5GB but you'll need upto 10-12GB during the checkout process
3) Advice i've seen around the net is to keep the history as linear as possible and to avoid push/pulling from other peoples git repos

Otherwise git checkout went well and was relatively simple to do just do:

git svn clone http://mesa.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/mesa/trunk mesa

and if that  gets interrupted you can just cd into the directory and run

git svn fetch 

and it will continue where it left of.

Rob

________________________________________
From: Joseph Wang [joequant at gmail.com]
Sent: 26 January 2013 06:45
To: mesa-users at lists.sourceforge.net
Cc: Anne Nicolas; Funda Wang
Subject: [mesa-users] Git and mesa packaging

Hi all,

Just to let everyone know that I've gotten mesa to work with a
completely open source pgplot replacement

https://github.com/AstroFloyd/PG2PLplot

The reason I need this is that I'm trying to package mesa into a form
that can be installed via a linux distribution, and the original
pgplot isn't 100% open source so this can't be done directly.
However, now that I've gotten pg2plplot working, this is no longer an
issue, and since plplot is newer, I'm playing with mesa to see if I
can get it to generate SVG files.

Also, I've been trying to figure out how best to package mesa on a
linux distribution.  The difficulty is that distributions are focused
on providing binaries, and what I'd like to do is to set things up so
that you can press a button and then get mesa installed so that you
can immediate run test code without having an extra compile, but then
set things up so that you can change or modify the source easily.  I
think this can be done with some scripts, but I'm still trying to
figure out how the scripts can work.

The other thing that I've been considering is to start a personal git
repository for mesa where I can publish some of my experiments without
disrupting the main svn tree.  There are some git<->svn tools that
people claim are transparent, and so what I might be able to do is to
set up a parallel git repository where I can break things, and people
can look at my code and tell me how bad it is :-) :-) :-)  If by some
miracle, I write something that isn't broken, then it can be merged
back into the main SVN with a button click.

As far as what I'm doing in the grand scheme of things....

I've been thinking about using Mesa as a tool for astronomy education
and to connect the amateur and professional communities.  One thing
that I've been thinking about making is a "newbie" screen that just
shows the relative size of the star, it's color, and maybe a cut away
that shows what is happening on the inside, and a GUI that generates
the fortran input files.

I was also thinking about how Mesa and other professional tools could
be used in the context of massive online courses.  Rather than just
read about stellar evolution in a textbook, you could have a "living
textbook" in which you have Mesa running in the back end, with
hyperlinks that guide people to the underlying physics, with links to
simple algebra problems that illustrate things like timescales and
nucleosynthesis.  Something else might be a "tour guide" approach.
Someone runs Mesa with animation and then comments on what is going
on.  (Something that I thought was really cool was when the inner core
of a massive star just stopped being convective the moment helium
burning started).

As far as visualization goes.  I'm thinking that 20 (or even 10 years)
from now, when someone publishes a paper, they don't publish a graph.
They include the data for the graph so that people can explore the
data.  So when someone publishes theory results a decade from now,
they won't just include a png with the results.  There will be some
sort of mechanism by which someone published the input and output
results and the computer screen auto generates the graph.

The problem with all of this is that it requires a level of
integration that doesn't exist right now.  You want your web browser
and mesa to talk with each other, and to get different people talking
to each other.  If it takes a game designer or high school teacher a
week to install mesa, then it's not useful to them, but if mesa comes
pre-loaded on a standard machine, then a game designer can think about
how to use mesa to generate more realistic looking stars and a high
school teacher can think about putting it into their lesson plans.

So the first step in doing this is to get mesa loaded into a linux
system where it co-exists with these tools, which is why I'm working
on packaging.

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