[ET Trac] [Einstein Toolkit] #1284: Want stand-alone parameter parser

[Einstein Toolkit]

#1284: Want stand-alone parameter parser
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  Reporter:  eschnett     |       Owner:     
      Type:  enhancement  |      Status:  new
  Priority:  major        |   Milestone:     
 Component:  Cactus       |     Version:     
Resolution:               |    Keywords:     
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Comment (by Wolfgang Kastaun <wolfgang.kastaun@…>):

 I agree with Ian. If this is intended to get information about existing
 simulations, I think a parameter file parser would be just a workaround
 for the lack of metadata stored by Cactus. We should separate two
 functionalities: How to specify parameters, i.e. input parfile format, and
 how to get parameters from existing simulations in postprocessing scripts.
 It is difficult to satisfy those two needs with a single parameter file
 format. For my postprocessing tasks the following points are important:

 1. A file with all parameters, including those set from default values,
 should be created when running a simulation.
 2. In contrast to the existing generated.par, it should be machiene
 readable, and it should contain information on the type of the parameters
 (int, bool, string etc) as well.
 4. A possibility to re-create this file from an available Cactus tree
 without running the simulation. I favor this function to be build into the
 executable because sometimes the Cactus tree is gone, but the executable
 is still stored in the simulation folder.

 This way, new simulations can be postprocessed in the future without
 having the executable. For the format, I suggest xml or hdf5. Both is
 easily readable from most languages including Python.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.einsteintoolkit.org/ticket/1284#comment:7>
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