Potential further collaboration between PUNCH and SunPy

[kakirastern]

Update on our side post-meeting-last-week: We are currently driving full-throttle the releases of at least both SunPy 2.1 and NDCube 2.0 by Christmas approx., which will eliminate many of the bugs formerly encountered by our active users. We do understand both the temporal and financial constraints to be expected of some project like PUNCH, as every open-source project would encounter these days in light of COVID-19. Besides we are a bunch of nerds who are interested in everything Python-based to be applied on solar physics. As I can gather from our rather nervous (maybe except me) energy which may have been more than mildly palpable during last meeting, we are actually very serious in committing the much needed and voluntary manpower to facilitate a timely delivery of any code product to be or not to be affiliated with us in order for your project to be brought into fruition.

It has been a pleasure to have the honor to host both West and Dan from PUNCH. We also understand your other competing project needs and commitments at the moment. But we are always here both during our regular weekly meetings on Wednesdays at 5pm UTC and at our official IRC at https://app.element.io/#/room/#sunpy:openastronomy.org and are willing to chat at your convenience.

Looking forward to meeting you guys again!

Sole Ref.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarimeter_to_Unify_the_Corona_and_Heliosphere

[kakirastern]

We are also very willing to speed up the screening of any affiliated package application that might be necessary for any prioritised projects to take off. We have had been fortunate to have to deal with some application(s) in backlog simply because the application(s) concerned is/are incomplete, despite our continuous and sincere urging for the applicant to conform to our standards.

[drzowie]

Great to hear from you, Kris!

As you can see, we're motoring through initial development and testing of Transform. I have to admit that moving from Perl to Python feels a bit like moving from the Millennium Falcon to the Eagle 5 -- but a very well appointed Eagle 5. The E5 is considerably more orthogonal than the MF, so maybe it's all for the best.

Once the current major TODOs are cleared, I'd like to make an initial release and then we should be ready to talk more seriously about affiliation status. Transform is considerably more general, of course, but I'm a firm believer in coding standards and we intend to keep the PUNCH codebase clean and well architected. Meeting the PEP-8 and commonsense importing rules on the SunPy website are not an issue for Transform and should not be for other PUNCH development that will follow.

In addition to being an important part o the PUNCH data pipeline and a useful general-purpose module, Transform is something of a "shakeout cruise" for the PUNCH team, as we build up our skillset in the vernacular of Python/NumPy over our native languages (IDL, Perl, C). I'm sure we'll have lots of questions to ask of, and items to contribute to, the SunPy team as we move forward.

For more information on the PUNCH mission, you can try our website "http://punch.spaceops.swri.org".

[kakirastern]

Thanks @drzowie Looking forward to collaborating with the PUNCH team 🚀

[kakirastern]

@hayesla will be the contact person to liaise between the two "collaborations" (particle-physics-speak) from this point onwards