[MOAB-dev] MOAB: Deprecation of ITAPS and other tools

[Vijay S. Mahadevan]

Dear MOAB users,

We would like to deprecate and potentially remove the following
interfaces and tools. Please let us know if you have concerns or any
questions.

1) ITAPS: The original motivations to expose a MOAB interface for
Fortran through iMesh are no longer valid as we have improved Fortran
bindings with iMOAB as long as you can use a F2003 compatible
compiler. If you are invoking the interface from C programs, the
transition should be straightforward.

With respect to using CGM and MeshKit with MOAB, we are planning to
choose direct interfaces to OCE in MOAB to access geometry information
and deprecate all of CGM in the process. I understand that this is a
significant departure from what we have been supporting so far. We
also want to move the algorithms in MeshKit to directly work with MOAB
interface (instead of through ITAPS), as this reduces indirections and
simplifies design for mesh generation. Overall, we expect that this
decision will ease code development of the computational workflow
stack, maintenance, and support going forward, as we no longer have
explicit funding to continue working on CGM and MeshKit itself.

We would like to hear from users about the set of iMesh features that
they are using currently. This will help us advise you about the
transition to using iMOAB instead.

2) Mesquite: This was partially a failed attempt to expose mesh
optimization algorithms that are closely developed with MOAB itself.
Our original intention here was to natively use MOAB mesh with the
optimization solvers in Mesquite, but this work did not progress as
well as we intended.
As a result, there are very few examples that actually use this
functionality and several parts are untested/dead code that I would
like to completely remove from the code base.

3) tools/refiner: This has been an old, redundant tool to refine
simplex meshes and will be replaced using the MeshRefinement
algorithms (mbumr tool) that is already available. This way, we can
reuse the algorithms that are already being tested and remove
unmaintained code.

4) hexmodops: This utility constructs meshes indicating structure of
local hex modification operations. We will move this to the examples
folder to showcase mesh modification operations. This should not have
been in the tools section to begin with.

We will start a separate thread about other ongoing developments soon
as we get ready to merge some of the efforts into the MOAB repository.
All comments on the above are welcome.

Thank you,
Vijay