[Mesa-users] Bug Reporting

[Francis Timmes]

Dear MESA-users,

A recent posting to astroph (https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01286v1) claims to 
report “dozens of numerical bugs” in MESA, “some of them quite severe”.  
This message addresses those claims.

One advantage of open-knowledge instruments is that a community can scour the instruments
to help make the tools better for everyone. We thus welcome bug reports, and encourage 
MESA users to send them directly to mesa-users as they arise. This will achieve a more	
rapid response and allow for all users to be aware of progress.

The bug report, posted on June 4, 2018, addressed MESA version 7624 which was released on June 3, 2015.
The current public version of MESA is 10398 which was released on March 21, 2018.

Here is the tracking of our earlier efforts, plus recent ones triggered by this posting: 

1) The partition function interpolation issue was fixed in MESA version 8654.
2) The minor issues with the thermal neutrino derivatives were fixed in MESA version 10298.
3) The temperature independent pre-factor for detailed balance calculations of reverse rates has now been corrected in 10836.
4) Some of the alleged bugs in the thermal neutrino derivatives are not in fact bugs.
5) The derivatives of equation of state quantities with respect to composition were fixed by MESA version 10108. 
    a few remaining minor issues were fixed in MESA version 10820. it is worth noting that MESA does not use any 
    of these second derivatives when constructing the MESA equation of state tables.

Sincerely,

The MESA Developers