It is time for the ~monthly online meeting of GMT folks. The GMT developers and others interested in contributing to GMT will be discussing issues relevant to developing, maintaining, documenting and testing GMT. The agenda for this meeting:
Touching base in these troubled times
UNAVCO GMT for Geodesy online course
GMT development news
a) Better naming conventions internally
b) Simplified glue for modules and libraries
c) Complete separation between shared libraries
d) CMake updates and automatic setup
Developer documentation status
a) Debugging GMT
b) New modules, new supplements
Update on the GMT Postdoc plans
GMT 6.1 release plan
The meeting is open to anyone. All meetings will be recorded and posted on the GMT site. Because NOAA currently forbids the use of zoom, we are trying Webex this time so Walter can join. Details on joining:
Thursday, May 14, 2020
1:00 pm | (UTC-04:00) Eastern Time (US & Canada) | 1 hr 30 mins
Paul went through renaming things in the code to be more consistent.
Better split between supplements and core. Found some bugs in the previous implementation. Dongdong improved the cmake to make this magic work. Need documentation still. No changes to core API needed to do all this .
Should these non-official API functions just become part of the API? Probably no but should be spelled out clearly. But MB-System uses undocumeted parts and we already take care not to break their code. So something has to be done.
Paul made 2 new modules (in a day!): grdmix (mix/blend images and grids) and batch (map a script over datafiles/etc in parallel; based on movie). Walter uses xargs but batch might be more generic and cross-platform.
Postdoc position:
Moving through the UH system.
Remote work is allowed due to covid etc.
Have to be in the US for tax reasons.
6.1.0 release:
Maybe have periodic minor releases (every 6 months) so that we don’t have to think about what goes in the release. Keeps the changelog easier to write/read.
But renaming and other developments might have caused some bugs and breaking changes. So it could be risky to put out 6.1 still.
Keeping separate branches could help but it’s very cumbersome and we end up not doing.
Add instructions to contributing docs to help keep this organized.
How to contribute small examples? Should we emulate matplotlib? Their cookbook and gallery style examples are helpful. 50 GMT examples are quite useful and condensed. But not very accessible to new users who maybe just want a grdview example. Should they be in the man pages or a gallery?
Gallery is nice since the man pages are more technical and harder to read for non-native or beginners.
Making examples easier to find would go a long way.
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