Future changes coming in version 0.10.0

[drewejohnson]

Wonderful user community,

The serpenttools python package will be undergoing a fairly substantial overhaul in the coming months leading up to version 0.10.0 (currently at 0.9.2). The primary goal of this release is to make serpentTools more like a library with generic file objects and containers detached from the parsing. To be clear,

1. We do not intend to break the functionality of "serpentTools.read"
2. We do not intend to remove plotting utilities
3. We do not intend to remove filtering capabilities

Users who primarily use "serpentTools.read" will see little to no changes. The main gains and changes will be noticed by people who develop with serpentTools, but we feel these will be beneficial changes.

The following release schedule is proposed

1. 0.9.3 in a few weeks, with formal notices on the new development phase
2. Critical bug fixes only for the master branch, with 0.9.x releases as necessary
3. Work on "serpentTools.next" module, leading up to 0.10.0 following a beta and release candidate period
4. 0.11.0 will move features from "serpentTools.next" into the primary API as the default classes for parsing and processing data. Importing from "serpentTools.next" will be allowed, but with deprecation notices
5. 0.12.0 will remove "serpentTools.next"

I encourage users to read the full pull request for proposed changes at https://github.com/CORE-GATECH-GROUP/se ... s/pull/400. The bulk of the proposed changes are described in https://github.com/drewejohnson/serpent ... amodel.rst. The pull request will be up for at least a week, giving users time to provide valuable feedback should they so choose.

Please feel free to reach out to me for discussion either on the pull request or here. We want this to be a smooth transition for all users and developers, and any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Andrew Johnson