This page describes naming conventions for the preCICE ecosystem.
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Updated 15 Jul 24

The preCICE name

preCICE is always stylized with lowercase pre and uppercase CICE, even in the beginning of a sentence.

In technical contexts (e.g., a repository or package name), the lowercase precice is typically preferred.

The forms PreCICE or PRECICE should be avoided, if possible. Hyphenating the name (e.g., pre-CICE) should be avoided. In LaTeX, use \hyphenation{preCICE}.

Naming adapters

Wherever possible, adapters use composite names that start with the name of the code they adapt, followed by preCICE. For example, human-friendly names of adapters (e.g., appearing in a publication) are FEniCS-preCICE and OpenFOAM-preCICE.

The motivation behind this is to be seen as extensions of the respective simulation code, and be easily discoverable in the context of that code. Looking at a package distribution repository, fenicsprecice should be close to fenics.

The adapter is not part of the name, for concision reasons. The FEniCS community only wants to know that this package enables them to use preCICE with FEniCS. The “adapter” is preCICE-specific terminology.

When hosted under the preCICE organization on GitHub, repositories are named as fenics-adapter, openfoam-adapter, etc. The names are always lowercase, and the dash increases readability. The -adapter part is now part of the name, because in the context of the preCICE organization on GitHub, the relevance to preCICE is implied: precice/fenics-adapter, precice/openfoam-adapter.

Naming tools

preCICE-related tools that are meant to be started as executables should be prepended by precice-. For example:

  • precice-tools
  • precice-config-visualizer
  • precice-micro-manager
  • precice-aste

This allows easy auto-completion and grouping or related tools.

As an exception, even if it is an executable developed in the context of preCICE, we consider the fmiprecice to follow the naming conventions of adapters, as it is seen from the perspective of the FMI community.

Python packages

Packages on PyPI are named as follows:

  • pyprecice: The py implies this is the Python integration, as is common in the Python world (other examples: mpi4py, petsc4py, pyMOR). We don’t name it just precice, because it does not install preCICE itself. That could be a separate package in the future, which could be a dependency of pyprecice. Still, the package enables import precice: a Python version of the preCICE API. This is intended, as it is clear this is not the C++ API of preCICE. It is also shorter and more intuitive for the user.
  • preCICE tools (names prepended by precice-):
    • precice-config-visualizer
    • precice-config-visualizer-gui
    • precice-micro-manager (previously micro-manager-precice)
  • preCICE adapters (names prepended by the respective code, the missing dash is consistent with the package name used with import):
    • fenicsprecice
    • fmiprecice

Docker images

Images on Docker Hub follow various names, which have not yet converged.

Since images are always scoped by the user, the precice- is omitted from the name. For example:

  • precice/precice provides preCICE
  • precice/<language>-bindings provide language bindings on top of preCICE
  • precice/<code>-precice provide an adapter for a code
  • precice/ci-<platform> do not provide preCICE, but dependencies and tools that are used to build preCICE in the CI