Development

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2015

March 4, 2015

Updates

• [TE] VTK wrapper
  • Works on VTK 5.10
  • Still need to test VTK 6
  • New general wrappers for python functions and classes

Items to Discuss

• [RR] Unmark UV-CDAT/VisTrails as a fork of VisTrails/VisTrails?
  • When filing a pull request from UV-CDAT/VisTrails, VisTrails/VisTrails is selected by default
  • People keep forgetting to change the default (#956 #968 #999 #1000 #1003 #1004)
  • Only way to change that is to not have it marked as a fork of VisTrails/VisTrails
  • Github staff can make that change for us; should we do it?
  • Juliana: comments on this? visibility vs. convenience/annoyance for developers
• [RR] What about #991?

February 25, 2015

Updates

Items to Discuss

• [TE] vtkviewcell for infovis support, can we unify with VTKCell?
  • need to test this
• [TE] vtk wrapping
  • Mostly finished
  • VTK 5.10 produce incorrect results with old wrapping
    • Old wrapper is based mostly on VTK 4
    • Most vtk_examples affected
    • [1]
    • should be able to upgrade from SetInput to SetInputData (need to drop GetOutput and replace with self ports)
    • can we change vtkInstance to just return self and not wrap things
  • terminator example not working under 5.8?
• How does VTK wrapping fit into general wrapping framework?
• [RR] new persistence package

February 18, 2015

Updates

• [RR] New VisTrails API and IPython integration (#24)

Items to Discuss

• [TE] VTK wrapping
  • Benchmarking vtk package
    • Old: 24.7 seconds
    • New: 10.5 seconds (Except first time that adds 8 sec)
      • The parsing that calls is_abstract (that tries to instanciate all vtk classes) is now only run the first time.
      • get_items_from_sigstring takes 2 seconds, maybe we can use a lookup dict for already computed sigstrings?
  • Now using a general python function wrapper
    • VTK classes are wrapped into python function that does not depend on vistrails
    • VTK functions can be executed without vistrails
    • The spec maps functions into vistrails modules, but can also describe wrapping
    • A general python function wrapper that supports
      • kwarg inputs
      • single, list, dict outputs
      • callback for progress reporting
      • temporary file generator for using FilePool
      • optional output generation
    • Creating specs:
      • • Create spec by hand
        • Auto-create spec outline (TODO) and manually finish it
        • Dynamically create spec (VTK)
        • Implement documentation wrappers (Can use scikitlearn wrapper to wrap numpydoc) (TODO)
        • Classes as bad functions needs to be wrapped in new functions before they are wrapped. This is different for each package.
          • Classes is hard: Like VTK, and matplotlib. Scikit-learn does still not wrap classes
        • Spec diffing and patching could be done using code from matplotlib.
  • Still needs upgrades from old VTK package
    • Is it possible to dynamically wrap functions, e.g, you see a SetFunc and just remove the 'Set' prefix. Or do you need to create a complete mapping?

February 11, 2015

Updates

• Update from Friday's meeting
  • discussed VisTrails internals
  • discussed wrapping
    • xml discussion, hard to modify because tied to db code
    • TE has made it possible to add the schema-defined attributes to the intermediate representation
    • higher-level operations on the port specs
  • make sure the simple case works
    • [JF] take a simple package with documentation and figure out what the base case for wrapping is

Items to Discuss

• [TE] VTK wrapping
  • Dynamic loading works
  • Reading XML is fast enough, but unserializing data is slow
  • Working on patterns for patching
  • Matplotlib has many advanced patterns like argument ordering, nested arguments, alternateSpecs, output types.
    • Having all this in a general wrapper might confuse users?
  • [RR] Delay module (except for identifiers) until you need it---e.g. don't deal with port specs, etc. until necessary
• Scripting Support #950
  • [RR] Issue with getting code from modules
  • Design a simple solution
  • [JF] Couldn't you use modules as black boxes without conversion, just to call into modules/subworkflows easily from e.g. IPython?
    • [RR] This is a job for the API, and a very separate use case. See #24

February 4, 2015

Updates

Items to Discuss

• Wrapping
  • Format to use? Currently XML (like current matplotlib)
    • JSON and YAML have simple "to python dictionary" methods
    • But don't stream
    • YAML a lot easier for humans
  • [DK] vtk-new-package also changes parameter names, creates enumerations
    • intermediate schema needs to be extensible
    • packages will want to store there specific infos for compute() method generation
    • also might have specs-altering info, like matplotlib's alternateSpec
  • representation to code , registry already has schema for some aspects
  • [RR] We might want to see if Module subclasses can be created lazily
    • no need to create all the classes just to register them in the registry and never actually use most of them
    • future effort
• [RR] Where should VisTrails packages live?
  • tej installs as 'vistrailspkg.tej', TE installed it as 'userpackages.tej'
  • Currently, standard packages are 'vistrails.packages.', user packages are 'userpackages.' and packages loaded through pkg_resources might be anything
  • [RR] Use 'vistrailspkg.' everywhere?
  • Long-term effort to simplify package distribution/installation (and have VisTrails get them automatically?)

January 28, 2015

Updates

• T. Caswell to come visit on Fri 6 to discuss wrapping work

Items to Discuss

• [TE] New VTK wrapping
  • Current code by DK seems a good deal faster
  • Generates XML that can be patched/tweaked, generates Python code from it, VisTrails only loads generated Python code
  • RR would rather have VisTrails load intermediate representation (= XML) directly, wants to make sure this is not slower
  • The goal is to turn the intermediate step into something generic that would be used for every wrapped package (vtk, numpy, matplotlib, sklearn, java) instead of each having its own
  • TC has its own code at github:VTTools which parses numpy docstrings and generates modules, doesn't yet handle classes or persist anything
• Web crawler
  • Right now, TE starts jobs for "start crawler", "stop crawler", "install classifier"
  • RR would rather have the crawling be a job as far as VisTrails and tej are concerned
  • The whole thing would be one pipeline: load examples, train classifier, start crawler [check for job, kill previous one, upload model, start processes], get snapshot, visualize
    • Need some support in tej and job submission system: long-running jobs, stop a job (wait for it to finish?), restart a job even though results are cached

January 21, 2015

Updates

Items to Discuss

• [RR] Unified wrapping method discussion #991
  • TE to work on reusable method with intermediate representation, starting with VTK
• [RR] Examples for scikit-learn: JF has an old example using Weka with parameter exploration (not currently in source tree)
  • AM's examples are enough
• [AM] scikit-learn package is done, merge it in? #955
  • RR will merge
• [RR] What should copyright headers say? #994
  • Let's keep everything in there: Utah/Poly/NYU

January 14, 2015

Updates

• [TE] Working on classifier
• [RR] Scripting integration, work in progress

Items to Discuss

• [RR] Unified wrapping method discussion (#991)
  • Let's talk next week, [AM] and [DK] are not here

January 7, 2015

Updates

Items to Discuss

• make sure that we address critical issues, questions, and pending review branches in a timely manner
• scripting support
  • [RR] no issues if we want to just keep annotations in the generated code to allow the link back to a workflow
  • [RR] can translate from workflow to script, working on script to workflow
  • will work for parameter value changes, structural changes require changes to the annotations
  • need to publish best practices here
  • would be cool to do looping in scripts (easier interface than with workflows)
• notebook support (convert form notebook to workflow)
  • RR will sync with FC on this
• Issue with console in built-from-scratch
  • [TC] iPython rearranged some of the completion stuff in 2.2 and 2.3
  • binary has old version of iPython -> 1.0.0, should we update?
• [TC] automated wrapping of numpy and scipy
  • discovered a bunch of malformed documentation in numpy and scipy
  • has github repo for vistrails tools
  • example modules wrap a bunch of R stuff (not baked in, just how things are)
  • will be pushing wrapping logic up
  • port names forbidden (window and domain)
  • have an import hook to get from yaml directly to VisTrails Modules
  • should work for any python modules with well-formed numpy docstrings.
• [Action] should make it clear in documentation that Constant now means serializable not that the value doesn't change (e.g. List)
• [TC] might be interesting to try to build components of matplotlib and accumulate in figure (long-term project, but thinking about how this might work)
• [TE] build and build scripts
  • completely automatic, buildbot
  • need to set the build machines for the environment we want for the binary
  • would virtualenv work here?
  • [TC] anaconda can pin versions, potential path to test different configurations
  • Q: upload nightly binary builds? A: makes sense, make sure they are well-labeled
• sourceforge stats: e.g. http://sourceforge.net/projects/vistrails/files/vistrails/nightly/vistrails-src-nightly.tar.gz/stats/timeline?dates=2014-01-01+to+2015-01-07
• package issues (see Remi's message)
• [TE] Scope of tej
  • Support single ssh commands?
  • Queue can be used as a remote machine (crawler is using queue.call*)
• SourceForge stats: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vistrails/files/vistrails/nightly/vistrails-src-nightly.tar.gz/stats/timeline?dates=2014-01-01+to+2015-01-07

Older meetings

• Development/2014
• Development/2013
• Development/2012
• Development/2011
• Development/2010