It is hard to find current FEniCS documentation

1

Hello everyone concerned. I am a former FEniCS user. I once updated the demos for FeniCS Tutorial on the GitHub issues. See issues from #54 to #66 on Issues · hplgit/fenics-tutorial · GitHub.

Recently, I started using FeniCS again, and I found the document management is chaotic. For example, on the page Documentation – FEniCS Project, the link of DOLFIN ChangeLog is missing. Later, I find the changelog can be found in Change log — DOLFIN 2018.1.0 documentation or Bitbucket. However, on the page DOLFIN documentation — DOLFIN 2018.1.0 documentation, the link of DOLFIN documentation is missing. The currently available DOLFIN documentation is DOLFIN documentation — DOLFIN documentation, which can be reached by DOLFIN (Python) API on Documentation – FEniCS Project.

I think this kind of document management is not conducive for users to look up and get the information they need. I wonder if anyone is maintaining the link to the FEniCS website.

Thank you for any replying.

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2

The changelog link has now been updated, see: Documentation – FEniCS Project.
For the other links, such as the one to the latest documentation, is a bit tricker to fix.
However, from the documentation link (First link in this post), you get directly to the latest version of the documentation by clicking: DOLFIN (Python) API reference.

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3

Thank you for your kind reply. I notice that the tutorial is outdated for several years. Another page named “get started” is still “TODO” (Sorry, I can’t find the link right now). Is there any good approaches to learn for the freshman?

4

There are many documented demos in dolfin, see for instance, Demos — DOLFIN documentation starting with the Poisson equation.

As dolfin (the bitbucket repo) is not under active development, most efforts nowadays goes in dolfinx, the development version of dolfin. It has not yet had a stable release, and the user interface might change. I have written up an updated tutorial for the current version of dolfinx at The FEniCS-X tutorial — FEniCS-X tutorial, and are trying to keep it up to date with the master branch.

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Thank you for your reply. I should follow the news of dolfinx in the future.

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I think the main problem (which probably cannot be solved easily) is that there are several version of the documentation available, and a simple google search often leads to outdated versions. At least this is what many of our students complained about.

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