rlancaste wrote: In terms of the number of options as well. I don't really know what options to include because there are a lot of options for SEP. I found that just a few tweaks to the options, really really improved things. So when I started working on this back in February/March, I kept begging people to help me figure out which options were best, which options to include, which options to leave out, and help in tuning a set of good options. While I got tons and tons of great help with testing and suggestions, we really needed more help ironing out the options. So in the end, I just left almost all of them in the editor, until people can tell me more about which options are helpful and which ones are not, I really don't think I should remove any until we get more feedback on them. But I'm hoping you are not overwhelmed by them. Hopefully as I said in my last post, most people won't even need to touch them.

The problem you are going to run into in asking about options is that you are only going to get valid feedback from a very small group of users who understand all the options. I certainly don't understand them. And that's a really, really difficult issue to solve. For reference, I manage a team of over 100 engineers doing software and systems engineering, and I am faced with the exact same issue every day. How do I take a complex problem and make it usable and understandable for my users who are not aware of the underlying complexity. So I feel your pain.

The key will be getting a set of defaults that works for the majority of the users. That was case prior to stellarsolver, and a month or two down the road we will hopefully be back there.

I do think the missing piece here is guidance. This is a big change, and there is nowhere to go that I am aware of to even begin to understand how to tweak things to improve matters, and from that provide feedback. What is All Stars? What is Parallel Small Scale & Parallel Large Scale? I don't expect you to answer that here BTW, it's somewhat rhetorical.

If there was a wiki that described the changes and describe the impact of the changes along with some guidance on how to debug and experiment, I think you may have gotten better feedback.

Overall, this is a good change, and I see the validity of it from an architectural perspective. I will continue to play with the nightlies (although the weather does not look like it will cooperate much over the next week or so)

J.

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