Firedrake meeting 2023 12 06

Date and time 2023-11-29 1600 GMT (1600 UTC)

Action Items

1. Pick Chair and Minuter (DD to pick minuter)
2. ALL: (ongoing) triage the open issues and confirm if they are indeed still open (and perhaps provide labels)
3. JB: Move pyop3 and FInAT to firedrakeproject
4. ALL: do things with SV's branches
5. DH: Email to Andreas to have 2 (+ others!!!) loopy PRs merged TODO: FIND OUT WHICH PRS THESE ARE
6. DH: Get Firedrake a docker open source account (link here)
7. DH: Talk to GregVernon about PR#2116.
8. DH: Revisit PR#2484.
9. DH: Order more Firedrake stickers
10. ALL/ANY: Drop libsupermesh (minutes)? JB: Waiting for https://github.com/Toblerity/rtree/pull/292
11. DD: Investigate adjoint test fails in teardown (minutes)

Agenda

Present: DD, DH, JB, KS, CC, CW, RK, PB, RNH, NB

Apologies:

CW: Fix for fun finalize bug

Is #3282 an acceptable fix for #3247? In particular my fix will not catch this failure mode again, but I have no idea how to do that.

-> Yes, #3282 got merged.

CW/PB/JB:Constants

PB: Constant(domain=mesh) warnings in tests

More than half of the ~1250 warnings raised during CI are coming from 3 files (regression/test_zero_forms.py, regression/test_scaled_mass.py, test_interpolation_from_parent.py). The most common warning has to do with Constant(domain=mesh). Some of these Constants are vector valued, and cannot be replaced with Function(Rspace), as there's a silent bug that allows the creation of a vector-valued R-space but with Function.dat of the wrong shape, see #3046.

-> Can't differentiate wrt Constant and vector-valued constants are currently not supported. Ongoing PR: #3046.

CW: Constant implementation discussion

The way Constants are currently implemented is hacky and weird (e.g. see #3261 for how we differentiate them and implement ufl2unicode). What is the way forward? Do they need adding to UFL (I think no, providing that UFL fix their type system)? Do we need to have vector-valued real Functions (not Arguments) (see above)?

-> A proper fix would require some serious thoughts and would need to happen at the UFL level, probably as part of the newfl rewrite. Not a priority at the moment.

JB: Notifying users of breaking changes

Users are not happy!

• How do we better inform users that they need to update a separately built PETSc? -> Don't know
• How do we inform users of breaking changes being introduced by PRs?

DD: firedrakeproject/firedrake Docker image is not working in macOS.

See the issue 3276. This error is related to netgen installation. We do not have this issue with the firedrakeproject/firedrake image built in Ubuntu.

-> Make this go away by building on Docket container

Merge PRs

Note that PRs put in this section should either be trivial or already have been reviewed. Discussion-worthy PRs should be separate agenda items.

• PB: fix demo #3281: Merged
• SM: #2776: Merged

Date of next meeting

1600 GMT (1600 UTC) 2023-12-13