2021 03 15 Open NEST Developer Video Conference

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Agenda

1. Welcome
2. Review of NEST User Mailing List
   • regarding StackOverflow answers: Important Q&A from the mailing list will be transfered to SO to gain better visibility. @helveg, volunteered to keep an eye on this.
   • Documentation will be adequately linked from the SO answers
   • SO team is working on solutions to float more up-to-date information up in search results (as to not show ancient install bug-fixes, etc…)
3. Project team round
4. In-depth discussion
   • Python installation of NEST, see #1948, #1959

Mailing list

• https://nest-simulator.org/mailinglist

Project team round

Here we discuss topics that need broader attention, for example questions that came up but are outside a single project's scope, larger planned changes/PRs that affect all teams or pending work that is blocked by external factors.

1. Models / NESTML
   • merged many PRs
   • one open point: better tests for two models, has been put on agenda for next hackathon
   • STDP seems to have an edge-case bug, issue will be opened to collect specific circumstances
2. PyNEST
   • #1954 bump python requirements breaks Travis, while GitHub-Actions work -> In depth discussion.
3. Kernel
   • found bug in music_output_proxies, need more specific tests
4. Installation
   • see in-depth discussion.
5. Infrastructure
   • nothing to report, will look into Travis-Python (see in-depth)
6. Documentation
   • discussing MC from main repository
   • worked on PRs
   • #1899 recorder documentation
   • ModelsModule refactoring
7. EBRAINS
   • nothing to report
8. (Feature) Random number generation
   • cross-validation tests with larger models, results are consistent, sim-times generally down.
9. (Feature) Automated Testing
   • nothing to report
10. (Feature) Extension Module System
    • a lot of refactoring going on
    • cleaning up the registration of models
    • naming consistently, cleanup
    • preparing PR (mostly name-changes), more substantial PR will follow.

In-depth discussion

Python installation of NEST

See context in #1948 and #1959

• developers like nest_vars.sh to have full control
• users view needs to be consistent and integrate with venv, virtualenv, pyenv, conda, …
• integrates well with Jupyter notebooks and various IDEs using environments
• cmake call is much simplified for users, no need to specify many PYTHON_* flags
• previous FindPythonLibs.cmake is not able to find correct libs in all types of environments
• installations from within a virtual environment will install all of NEST into the environment.
• plan breakout session on test-matrix (environments, MPI, OS, …)

Travis Maintenance

• how long to keep Travis running? Now Python version is difficult to maintain.
• -> only run static checks on Travis.
• Synatx checks on the Github-Actions currently do not fail the build, PR in progress.