[Mesa-users] New MESA release candidate r21.12.1-rc1

[Rob Farmer]

Hi All,

I'm pleased to announce the first release candidate (RC1) for the next
public release of MESA. As part of the development strategy for MESA we are
making a pre-release version of MESA available for testing before we make a
full release. We expect the full release to occur in ~2 weeks (barring any
major problems). Note this version should not be used for science (yet) but
we expect this should be close to the final released version.

Highlights from the new release include the new Skye EOS (Jermyn et al
2021), addition of an ideal gas EOS, updates to the opacities, a new time
dependent convection model (TDC), and a new auto differentiation module
(autodiff) for providing numerical partial derivatives. Users testing the
new version should carefully read the changelog
https://docs.mesastar.org/en/latest/changelog.html as there have been a
number of backwards incompatible changes.

We value any feedback from the community on:

The changes made: Have we broken your favorite type of star?
Documentation: It's still under development but are there things that are
unclear in what's been written?

Release notes: Did we miss documenting some changes that you think are
important?

and crucially if it introduces bugs into your science.

If you have a bug or an issue feel free either to reply to this message or
add it to the github bug tracker https://github.com/MESAHub/mesa/issues

We have also changed the version number scheme we use, to help denote the
point where we have switched to github (https://github.com/MESAHub/mesa).
Version numbers going forward will have the format YY.MM.N (Year . Month .
Number) rather than the previous scheme which was simply the commit number,
and which no longer makes sense when using git. Thus the RC1 will be
r21.12.1-rc1 while we expect the release to be r21.12.1 .

The RC1 can be found at:
https://github.com/MESAHub/mesa/releases/tag/r21.12.1-rc1

or checkout with git: git checkout tags/r21.12.1-rc1

We will not be making a zenodo entry for release candidates, only for the
final release.

As part of our scheme to migrate away from sourceforge entirely we have
deprecated using sourceforge for hosting the zip folders. From this release
onwards we will only be uploading them to Zenodo (
https://zenodo.org/record/4311514). The website mesa.sourceforge.net will
also soon be turned into a redirect to https://docs.mesastar.org
<https://eur04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdocs.mesastar.org%2Fen%2Flatest%2Fchangelog.html&data=04%7C01%7Cr.j.farmer%40uva.nl%7Cd870854ec09f4754e4d208d89ac8d951%7Ca0f1cacd618c4403b94576fb3d6874e5%7C1%7C0%7C637429534712471086%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=4H06%2BpIzo0%2FIOcFLRdWP1lK6XOFO6BDNyWznhUlb3GY%3D&reserved=0>
.

Don’t forget that if you want to contribute to MESA we have a guide:

https://docs.mesastar.org/en/latest/contributing.html

Contributions can take many forms, from bug reports, documentation fixes,
and new code or science. Not everyone has to be a coder to contribute. If
you have something you want to contribute but have doubts about it, then
feel free to reach out to any of the MESA developers and we can provide
help and guidance.

We have also welcomed two new developers to the team since the last release:

Earl Bellinger

Eoin Farrell

As well as contributions and help from the community:

Francisco De Geronimo, Jared Goldberg, Alex Ji, Mathieu Renzo, Jeremy
Sakstein, Thomas Steindl, Jason Wright, and the MESA summer school 2021.

Thanks

Rob

On behalf of the MESA team (Bill P, Aaron, Adam, Anne, Bill W, Earl, Eoin,
Evan, Frank, Josiah, Lars, Matteo, Meridith, Pablo, Radek, Rich, Rob,
Warrick)
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