2021 09 13 Open NEST Developer Video Conference

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Agenda

1. Welcome
2. Review of NEST User Mailing List
3. Project team round
4. In-depth discussion
   • Failing assertions #2101
   • Naming of modules (see nest-connplotter:#2)

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
   • work on 3rd-factor plasicity / clopath model is ongoing
2. PyNEST
   • Get/SetKernel PR is merged, so from now on NEST attributes can be used when using master branch
3. Kernel
   • no report
4. Installation
   • nothing to report
5. Infrastructure
   • new testing setup without nosetests, all PyTest
     • now handles MPI running better/correctly
     • --numprocesses=auto for speed vs. --numprocesses=1 for better readability. in do_tests.sh
6. Documentation
   • nothing to report
7. EBRAINS
   • nothing to report
8. (Feature) Automated Testing
   • (see infrastructure)
9. (Feature) Extension Module System
   • nothing to report, progress may be too slow to make 3.1 release.

In-depth discussion

Failing assertions #2101

• some assertions in tests triggered with -D_GLIBCXX_ASSERTIONS flag set
• found cases where an element of zero-length array is accessed, temporarily fixed with if vector_ptr.size() > 0:, but need to restructure some code.
• flag should always be enabled in full build CI testing

Naming of modules (see nest-connplotter:#2)

• Python modules can not have a dash
• Repositories are consistently named with dashes in their names
• nest-connplotter module is currently named nestConnPlotter, other names are also incosistent.
• packaging names also very different (Docker, apt, spack, fedora, Conda, etc.)
• What to do?
  • ideally pip install X and import X

Possible changes

• remove hyphen from ode-toolbox repository, also readthedocs page currently with hyphen
• remove nest- from connplotter (done just now)
• only historical reasons for nestio module in sionlib-reader
  • additionally more refactoring + documentation necessary
  • NEO also has a submodule called nestio but only reads the ascii files of NEST (maintained on NEO side)

See Table in #2161 and update/comment there!