[mesa-users] using MESA for education

[Warrick Ball]

Rob,

I can't help on all the problems, but this one seemed tractable with 
command line tools.

> There are some issues with MESA documentation I need to discuss with
> someone: the file(s) with all the default variable settings have
> documentation in them (in Fortran comments) but it's very hard to read
> automatically e.g. the comments are either before, after, or on the same
> line as the variable setting. This needs to be cleared up by someone who
> knows what they are doing so it can be rendered machine-readable. There
> also needs to be a standard layout, because I suspect any major changes
> will break what I have already written. I can adapt, but it'll be a pain
> to keep changing code.

I just formulated this sed command and tested it on controls.defaults:

sed -e 's/ *!.*$//g' -e '/^ *$/d' $MESA_DIR/star/defaults/controls.defaults

Pipe to `less` or whatever at your leisure.  The first sed instruction 
deletes everything matching "spaces-bang-anything-endline" from each line. 
The second deletes remaining empty lines.  So the output is just the 
instructions.

Hope that's helpful!  Maybe such a comment-less file is easier to read?

W

On Tue, 10 Jun 2014, Robert Izzard wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Time to briefly de-lurk before heading back into the nightmare that is 
> workshop organisation and proofreading.
>
> Indeed, Window To The Stars (WTTS) works from a live CD (as they were in 
> the day!) and of course this can be put on a USB stick. The version you 
> can download from my website 
> (http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~izzard/window.html) is for Evert 
> Glebbeek's version of Peter Eggleton's excellent TWIN code. We use this 
> in our computer labs precisely because it's so light: installing MESA 
> filled my disk, while TWIN is tiny in comparison and its RAM footprint 
> is generally far smaller. When you have a lab of 30 students running on 
> NFS mounted partitions on dated hardware, this is a bonus.
>
> If I'm going to do this again, e.g. for MESA, does anyone know what's 
> the best linux distribution to use when making an image for a USB stick?
>
> Anyway, I digress ... I am working when I can (weekends, mostly) to make 
> WTTS use MESA. I have most of it functioning (option settings, logs, 
> HRD, rho-T, internals, structure, Kippenhahns, photos) , I just need to 
> fix the restart from a photo and it'll be ready to go. Rich, is this 
> something I should think about merging into your SDK at some point? It 
> needs MESA source at least because it needs the source code to find all 
> the defaults. (Unless there's a way to put a command line switch into 
> MESA to get it to just write out all its defaults? Would be handy.)
>
> There are some issues with MESA documentation I need to discuss with 
> someone: the file(s) with all the default variable settings have 
> documentation in them (in Fortran comments) but it's very hard to read 
> automatically e.g. the comments are either before, after, or on the same 
> line as the variable setting. This needs to be cleared up by someone who 
> knows what they are doing so it can be rendered machine-readable. There 
> also needs to be a standard layout, because I suspect any major changes 
> will break what I have already written. I can adapt, but it'll be a pain 
> to keep changing code.
>
> Also, if there's anyone here who knows how to make .deb packages from Perl code and (importantly) Perl modules, please get in touch. I have tried and failed to do this... but if I can package up WTTS as a package for Ubuntu, it'll be much easier to install.
>
> cheers
> rob
>


------------
Warrick Ball
Postdoc, Institut für Astrophysik Göttingen
wball at astro.physik.uni-goettingen.de
+49 (0) 551 39 5069