#919: simfactory fails for standard thornlist copied using sync ---------------------+------------------------------------------------------ Reporter: knarf | Owner: eschnett Type: defect | Status: review Priority: major | Milestone: ET_2012_05 Component: Other | Version: Resolution: | Keywords: ---------------------+------------------------------------------------------
Comment (by rhaas):
Simfactory 'silentely' enabling thorns is harmful in this workflow of
which I think it's not that unusual.
Yes please. This is the very same workflow that I use. I never do an actual checkout on the clusters (since for example I have darcs repositories in my usual checkout or modifications in local repositories) and consider the source code there read only and to be explicitly only a copy of the "master" source on my workstation.
This does not seem to be the view taken by the original simfactory author but I would find it very convenient if simfactory would have an optional mode of operation that would not modify my provided files unless there are "@@" constructs. Eg. simfactory currently looks for occurences of TerminationTrigger options in the parameter file. Enabling thorns would also seem to be a bad idea to me since eg. I might not want to compile them since I use a different set of modules that will not let me compile them or just might want to keep my source tree as small as possible (eg on Kraken where Cactus lives in my home directory).
This is just my very personal preference but in general I prefer a code that does only what I ask it to do (and might require more verbose options because of this) over a code that is helpful and then surprises me. Eg not http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html :-)