The Community Bonding period will finally come to a close, come May 19. It’s been an interesting journey thus far.
I’ve been busy with my internal exams this week, but not so much as to miss out on the latest happenings in and around SunPy. I’ve also migrated to a Ubuntu-only laptop after fighting through kernel panics, grub problems, filesystems not being recognized, etc. Ultimately, I found that the problem was a corrupt LiveUSB!
Perhaps the most important news in the context of my project is that the Astropy community have merged the APE5 pull request into their master branch. They will continue to test thoroughly and bring out the documentation for the same next week. My job is to chalk out relevant use-cases from this branch that will be handy for the project, and collate them into an IPython Notebook.
I have been working on my Map Sources PR for a while now. I haven’t had the opportunity to finish it when I would’ve liked, but I’ll be finishing it latest by tomorrow. In this PR, I have added a series of tests for each class in sunpy.map.sources.
Stuart taught me how to use meld, a 3-way merge conflict fixing tool, in a one-on-one session. This was to rebase the map sources branch on a bug-fix branch which involved modifying values in sunpy.database.tests.test_tables.py – merge conflicts had to be removed. It was really informative and interesting as well.
Also, in the midst of testing, I discovered an issue with the Virtual Solar Observatory that was preventing one of the database tests from passing. Downloads from particular time periods and of certain instrument types (such as HMI) would yield empty lists. I opened an issue for this in SunPy.
I’ve been present in developer meetings that have taken place so far. Of special note was a conference between Stuart, David, Steven and I, which took place on May 1st. This meeting was held to discuss my project and how I am to go about it. The summary of what was discussed on the meeting is as follows, posted verbatim from the SunPy GSoC 2014 mailing list -:
- Filing in an SEP, as the project will introduce a major feature into the SunPy codebase. It will help stimulate design discussion and finalize the API that we wish to incorporate.
- Astropy APE5 – It is still in review and will be introducing features in the Astropy codebase by means of a PR (here). Classes like CoordinateRepresentation and CoordinateFrame are central to our agenda.
- API Testing – Stuart’s idea of creating the bare-bones API and writing tests for it as we would normally write tests for a repository. Initially all tests would fail but with time and code, the tests will be made to pass.
- Creating a ‘notebook’ with relevant use cases from Astropy which will help the team understand how this project is going to be implemented.
- Beginning the coding period, 19th May – and how my exams start soon after! The only exam schedule I know of right now is of my second set of internal exams – 13th, 15th and 17th. Presumably my external practical exams will be the week after. Semester exams begin in the final week of May. The entire university will be done with semester exams by June 30th, but I am not aware of my schedule yet.
Bring on the coding period, I say!
Back in hardware(software?) mode
My GSoC Journey 