#1284: Want stand-alone parameter parser --------------------------+------------------------------------------------- Reporter: eschnett | Owner: Type: enhancement | Status: new Priority: major | Milestone: Component: Cactus | Version: Resolution: | Keywords: --------------------------+-------------------------------------------------
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.