[mesa-users] Git and mesa packaging

[Bill Paxton]

Hi,

Wow!!!   Great progress.   And fascinating long term thinking.
Next it will be high school science classes using MESA.  ;-)   Cool.

One thing to keep in mind in designing this: let's try to 
nudge things away from having multiple mesa forks.
Somehow we need to make it easier for people to
do interesting new things in the context of a standard mesa
rather than forking.  I've tried to do a bit of that already
by adding "hooks" such as the "other" routines for star.

It is also important to respond quickly to user bug reports
and requests for new features.  Failure to respond
quickly breeds frustration and can drive someone who
has no desired to fork mesa to consider doing it
anyway as a last option to get a solution.

So keep up the good work and keep thinking long term.
And let's see if we can evolve mesa as a unified system
for the benefit of a unified community of user-developers.

Cheers,
Bill



On Jan 25, 2013, at 10:45 PM, Joseph Wang wrote:

> 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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