Proposal: Diffussion Equation Example about firedrake

[dham]

Thanks for taking the initiative to help us with our documentation. I have a few comments, both about mechanism and content.

The mechanism for making contributions on GitHub is to fork our repository, and make a branch in your fork with your proposed changes. You then make a pull request to suggest we adopt those changes.

The primary way to contribute examples is by writing what we call demos. These are restructured text files in subfolders of the demos folder in our source tree. They are converted into python files during the documentation building process. The result is a demo page on the website accompanied by a runable python script. You can see these demos on the documentation page. Instructions on building the documentation are on the download page.

Now, in terms of content, each demo should be showing some significant new feature of Firedrake so that users can refer to the demos to see how to do things. Of the Python files in your zip archive, the steady state heat equation seems to me to be materially identical to our existing Poisson tutorial notebook. The other two files seem to primarily introduce timestepping and vtk output. These are covered in our Burgers equation demo. The Burgers equation tutorial notebook takes this a bit further to show how to timestep more efficiently, and how to visualise timestepping using matplotlib.

Right now, it's not quite clear to me what additional information a user would draw from these examples, but my perspective is definitely not that of a typical user so I would really like to hear where our offering has gaps. PRs to fill them are even more welcome.

[ChibiSheepy]

Thank you for your feedback! Regarding your concerns about the additional information a user could possibly draw from these examples, compared to existing demos, I agree that there aren't any additional gaps being filled here, so perhaps these are not ideal to merge into the main repository. This was more a personal project of mine pertaining to a class, so I think it is acceptable for these to just remain separated, where anyone who is interested perhaps can stumble on this issue.