Dear NEST Users and Developers,

This week has brought a range of important changes of NEST Simulator, mostly behind the scenes. Building on years of work, started by Jochen Eppler and Håkon Mørk, and a huge effort to port thousands of SLI-based tests to Python, we have finally removed the SLI interpreter from NEST. The Python interface now interacts directly with the C++ backend. These changes are currently only available to those who build NEST themselves form the source code on Github. We plan to release the first SLI-free NEST versions, NEST 3.10, ahead of the NEST Conference in June. Then, you will finally be able to pip install nest.

For users, this should bring only minimal changes. You will find them documented on https://nest-simulator.readthedocs.io/en/latest/whats_new/v3.10/index.html#release-3-10. Please let us know if you run into any difficulties adjusting your model scripts.

Developers may need to make some adjustments to your code, but also those changes should be rather schematic. The key points are described in the "What's new in 3.10" document linked above. Again, do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or run into problems.

Finally, we have changed the name of the central branch for NEST Simulator from "master" to "main" on Github. So if you have NEST cloned to your computer from the public NEST repository, please do the following in your local repo, assuming that nest_public is the name for the remote git@github.com:nest/nest-simulator.git:

git branch -m master main
git fetch nest_public
git branch -u nest_public/main main

# do this only if you want to set nest_public/main as upstream tracking branch
git remote set-head nest_public -a
  
On behalf of the NEST developer crowd
Hans Ekkehard

-- 

 

Prof. Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser

Research Committee Chair, Faculty of Science and Technology

 

Department of Data Science

Faculty of Science and Technology

Norwegian University of Life Sciences

PO Box 5003, 1432 Aas, Norway

 

Phone +47 6723 1560

Email hans.ekkehard.plesser@nmbu.no

Home http://arken.nmbu.no/~plesser