Firedrake meeting 2025 07 09 - firedrakeproject/firedrake GitHub Wiki

Date and time 2025-07-09 1600 UTC

Action Items

  1. Pick Chair and Minuter (KS to pick)
  2. ALL: (ongoing) triage the open issues and confirm if they are indeed still open (and perhaps provide labels)
  3. ALL: do things with SV's branches
  4. DH: Email to Andreas to have 2 (+ others!!!) loopy PRs merged TODO: FIND OUT WHICH PRS THESE ARE
  5. DH: Talk to GregVernon about PR#2116.
  6. JB: Enable merge queues (minutes)
  7. LC: Try to merge RNH' PR: Movable VOM
  8. PB: Profile and speed up some tests (minutes, minutes)
  9. CW: More testing configurations (minutes)
  10. All: Do post merge works (interpolate, abstract reduced functionals, etc.)
  11. CW: Preliminary prep for PETSc User Meeting 2026 (minutes)

Agenda

Present: DH, LC, KS, RK, PB, CW, IM

Apologies: JHC

CW: Is it time for a new major release?

A lot of new features have been added. I don't believe that we have to follow PETSc (though a patch release may be necessary).

Minutes:

  • PB/RK having Irksome issues, they don't work with the release, combined with UFL main due to API changes relating to differentiation.
  • DH points out that a major release now means we would need to continue supporting the old release, at least until October.
  • Irksome master works with current release of firedrake and ufl - suggestion to make Irksome release now. Then merge things that are broken and allow Irksome master to track Firedrake master.
  • CW to help RK to set up releases in Irksome. DH suggests a release branch should exist to enable quick bug fixes.
  • No Firedrake release until October as planned. Note that we should publicise this well in September.

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.

https://github.com/firedrakeproject/firedrake/pull/4425

  • More payments links to be added
  • Merge this now, add the others later

KS: remove mesh.init() https://github.com/firedrakeproject/firedrake/pull/4201

  • Significant changes to mesh constructor
  • Lots of removals of mesh.init() calls
  • CW suggests lowering the new parameter ignore_label_halo to a different level of the API.

LC: VOM permutation matrix https://github.com/firedrakeproject/firedrake/pull/4341

  • Adds correct structure to match PETSc MatContext
  • Some conversation about how to handle errors raised from PETSc in tests - resolved that what is there is fine.
  • Merged

Blitz of other PRs took us from 100 open PRs to less than 90!

Date of next meeting

1600 UTC 2025-07-16