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- <title>deal.II future plans</title>
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- <h2>Plans for the future of deal.II</h2>
-
- <p>
- While we consider <acronym>deal.II</acronym> quite useful
- in the present form, there are still many things that we would
- like to implement in future versions. Among these are the following
- topics:
- <ul>
- <li> <p> <strong>Multigrid:</strong> We are working on an
- implementation of multigrid methods for
- <acronym>deal.II</acronym>. While this is running on globally
- refined grids, we are still having problems on locally
- refined meshes. For those, multigrid is only applicable with
- DG methods yet.
- </p>
-
- <li> <p>
- <strong>The <I>hp</I>-method of finite elements:</strong>
- Implementing this will need a class analogous to the
- <code>DoFHandler</code> class, as well as extensions to the finite
- element classes where descriptions of interface conditions to
- other finite elements on neighboring cells are needed. While
- the latter is straightforward, the first is a major
- task. We are presently working on this and hope to have something in
- the near future for at least discontinuous elements. The limiting
- factor to our present efforts is the number of developers.
- </p>
-
- <li> <p>
- <strong>More output formats:</strong>
- It would be nice to have the possibility of writing output in
- more graphics formats. This is a simple task, since basically
- only two files have to be modified and the interface is very
- simple. In case you have an unsupported graphics program and
- a student with half a week spare time, this is the right
- project.
- </p>
-
- <li> <p>
- <strong>More example programs:</strong>
- There are still many aspects of the library that are not yet
- covered by the example programs (in particular, on the list
- of things are the <code class="class">ParameterHandler</code>,
- block matrices,
- and the <code class="class">FilteredMatrix</code>
- classes, but many other aspects as well). This is certainly
- something that should be improved, but is rather time
- consuming.
- </p>
-
- <li> <p>
- <strong>A better test-suite:</strong> We have a
- suite of programs (approximately 440 programs with roughly
- 58,000 lines of code at present) that are run automatically
- for regression tests each night. Some of these are modified real-life
- applications, so they should cover a relevant part of the
- library, and some others test certain parts of the library
- extensively, but it would be necessary to reach every corner of
- the library to be sure a certain patch does not break
- something. Also, a complete test-suite for the library would
- be quite valuable for ports to new computer systems and
- compilers.
- </p>
-
- <li> <p>
- <strong>Documentation:</strong>
- Printing the documentation is probably not what one would
- usually do anyway, due to the sheer size. However, it might
- be useful to print, for instance, the example programs. There
- might be more information worth printing in some cases which
- I presently can't think about.
- </p>
-
- <p>
- For these cases, it would be interesting to have them in
- another format than HTML. We think that DocBook SGML would be
- a good choice, since it can be converted into many other
- formats, including printable ones and ones which can be
- nicely displayed on the screen. This would require that some
- document-generating scripts produce SGML instead of (or in
- addition to) HTML, and some other tweaks, but is probably no
- big deal. It just needs someone with appropriate knowledge.
- </p>
-
- <li> <p>
- <strong>Installation:</strong>
- Some parts of the configure machinery and the installation
- process are not as simple as they should be. This should
- eventually be made better. The most outstanding example is
- the way we build shared libraries; for this, the
- <a href="http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/libtool.html"
- target="_top">libtool</a> utility may be a useful.
- Help in the configuration of these things would be greatly
- appreciated.
- </p>
- </ul>
- </p>
-
- <p>
- We believe in an open development model and would like to
- encourage everyone to send us patches and extensions they have. We
- think that a cooperative effort can improve the library much more
- than a limited and closed circle of developers ever can. We are
- therefore eager to review contributions by others for inclusion
- into the library and to help in their development. Please feel
- free to contact us in such cases!
- </p>
-
-
- <hr>
-
- <address>
- <a href="mail.html" target="body">The deal.II mailing list</a></address>
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