[Users] how to review a contribution guideline

[Gabriele Bozzola]

Hello,

I'll take the chance for the following comment (which builds up upon
comments I made in past telecons).

I don't know what is the process to propose a change in the guidelines,
but I would like to make the following proposal:

* New/updated thorns should add a gallery example upon inclusion or
  significant update, *

Rationale:

The latest release of the Einstein Toolkit contains roughly 300 thorns
(including the ones that are disabled). However, there are only 5 curated
examples (ie, the gallery examples) on how to do things. This means,
among the other things, that:
- The vast majority of thorns do not have an example on how to use them.
  One can look at test files, but they are often not reflective of
real-world use.
  Some thorns come with par files, but they are not tested and might no
  longer work.
- There is a discoverability problem. It is impossible to know what the
Einstein
  Toolkit can do and what it cannot do.
- It is hard to perform new and different simulations (unless you have a
lot
  of experience). This is especially relevant for new users, which have only
  a handful of curated examples to look at. On the flip side, it is easy to
make
  mistakes, given that one will likely copy&paste parameters without
  understanding what they do.
Overall, I believe that having more gallery examples will make the toolkit
more user-friendly.

Typically, developers already have some parameter files that they have used
for their work/publication, so, I would expect that cleaning it up should
not be
too much of an added burden. The actual extra burden that this change
introduces
is that there will be more gallery examples that have to be tested upon
release.

What do you think?

Best,
Gabriele


On Tue, Aug 2, 2022 at 8:17 AM Roland Haas <rhaas at illinois.edu> wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> Since I am serving as release manager for the upcoming release and
> could not find this information collated in a single location I started
> to draft a reviewer's guide for contributions (slightly different from
> the how to review a patch guide
> https://docs.einsteintoolkit.org/et-docs/How_to_Review_a_Patch that
> already existed):
>
> https://docs.einsteintoolkit.org/et-docs/How_to_Review_a_new_component
>
> Comments and contributions (you may have to send email first to have an
> account on the wiki created) would be very welcome.
>
> Yours,
> Roland
>
> --
> My email is as private as my paper mail. I therefore support encrypting
> and signing email messages. Get my PGP key from http://pgp.mit.edu .
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