Topic: Looking for permission to push ahead with some bigger changes
Hi everyone. I have had a bit of a break from OOFEM, but I have been planning on getting back into it very soon.
But! I have had a number of changes that I have wanted to deploy, which I have held back on for a very long time now, because they do change behavior, or removes a means to use the code in a particular way.
The single most important feature, is that of the way we handle dofs, bc's, and IC's, in code, as was discussed here: http://www.oofem.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1662 (wow, it was back in 2016)
This is critical for FE^2 simulations, and will, overall, mean much more features in almost all solvers, and way less code.
A common blocker has also been the way nlinearstatic handles mixed input control. I have an alternative approach, but, I have intentionally not made it 100% compatible. The DOF changes will, unavoidably, break nlinearstatic, and there is no way to do it the old way anymore.
But, IMHO, the old way is a dead end. The new approach, marking the *load* as direct or indirect, is much more natural, easier for users, allows for single-step anlysis (so potentially twice as fast in common scenarios).
A whole bunch of relatively minor improvements, that aren't complicated, and can be done in next to no time at all if we agree to go ahead:
https://github.com/oofem/oofem/issues/13 newer CMake
https://github.com/oofem/oofem/issues/5 strings instead of enums in input files
https://github.com/oofem/oofem/issues/16 the new output export module
https://github.com/oofem/oofem/issues/9 removing old BC/IC approach