Joining forces with GridMap

[dan-blanchard]

In October 2012, long before pythongrid was pip-installable, I took it upon myself to fork it (as GridMap) because I wanted to restructure many things and it wasn't on GitHub yet. In the course of doing so, I added a number of improvements over the then-current version of pythongrid:

• Made everything Python 3 compatible (and require 2.7+)
• Configuration is done via environment variables instead of modifying a Python file in site-packages
• More documentation.
• PEP8 clean up
• Made it pip installable
• Set up travis and coveralls for automated testing (and added more tests)
• Remove a bunch of deprecated things
• Split libpythongrid.py code up into separate modules for better readability
• Process cpu/memory usage stats are now gathered using psutil
• All jobs get killed if you kill the submitting Python process.
• Other bug fixes.

One of the main reasons I forked it was that I experimented for a while with using Redis for managing the job inputs and outputs instead of sending everything with ØMQ, but I later saw the light and switched that back to how you guys were doing it previously.

Anyway, I feel like since I've returned to using ØMQ, our two projects aren't that different anymore. Really, I've just modernized things, added documentation, made configuration simpler, and fixed some bugs. At this point, I feel like it just makes sense to join forces, since we are both trying to do the same thing.

Trying to make a pull request with my changes would be very difficult (and essentially pointless for you to review), because we've both renamed files and moved things around since I initially grabbed things from your old Google Code repository in August of 2012.

As I've already got a number of issues/milestones/etc. we're tracking over on the GridMap repository, I'd like to invite you to check out our code and consider becoming a contributor to GridMap (and redirecting people there) if you like what you see.

Also, I should probably mention that I'm the current primary maintainer of DRMAA Python, which both our projects rely on, and I was planning on adding a link on the DRMAA Python page to GridMap. That's actually one of the reasons I am writing you this in the first place. I didn't want to confuse people by linking to both projects, since they're so similar, and since GridMap is easier to use and Python 3 compatible, I was just going to link to it. That made me feel guilty about never trying to give back to you guys after forking your project.

[cwidmer]

Dan,

thank you very much for getting in touch, it's been a while since I actively have worked on pythongrid. It may make a lot of sense to join forces indeed, I'll take some time to evaluate GridMap in detail and figure out the best way to move ahead. We're going to push some new features to pythongrid the coming weeks including support for Torque, so let's see how it goes.

All the best,
Chris