Update on MOE

[Christian Gruber]

Greetings folks,

MOE was a project offered by some stalwart Googlers, but has had a long period of inattention as its authors had other important work, or had left Google.  I would like to make a few (cautious) announcements.

* Overview *

(1) Moe is getting some love now.  We've been actively developing, partly some clean up, partly some bug-fixes, and a few new features.

(2) I'm in the process of making sure the open-source project is more closely in sync with google's internal version, and trying to make it easier to contribute to. 

(3) Aside from some refactoring and internal changes, and some bug-fixes, I'm working towards a new directive which will permit pull requests to be staged directly into a workspace of your "internal" repository.  I'll post more about this when it's ready, and the docs are updated.

In detail, we've moved the project to github, with moe-java becoming github.com/google/MOE, and the original make-open-easy becoming github.com/google/MOE-py.  I'll be updating and expanding the documentation (wiki is ported, but we have a lot of drift between internal and external docs I'm trying to fix up).  The MOE-py project is effectively unmaintained, but really needful pull requests will be considered.  

The code is in transition, so if you see conflicting design-patterns, please be patient.  Big-bang is hard, so I'm trying to evolve it as-needed, but towards a more flexible, decoupled pattern that I think is in the original spirit of the intention.

A quick note of caution - MOE is not permanently staffed - I'm a temporary caretaker - but it has a lot of use by Google, and we want to continue to ensure it meets our needs, and keep it open so others can make use of the tool themselves, perhaps innovate based on it, help us improve it if you find it useful. 

Christian.

P.S. Thanks to a variety of folks, Dan Bentley, Yash Parghi, primarily, plus a lot of other contributors too numerous to mention. 

[Nate]

Thank You!