Hello Ian,
Aha, that's interesting. Though I guess it would probably confuse a lot of thorns, so I'm not sure how useful it in in practice. The initial data solver would run again, for example.
Correct. The current default is "safer" it seems. The "relaxed" setting I have never seen used myself.
I would have expected Carpet to initialise variables to poison, so I should be seeing poison.
That is also what I would have expected. Have you set both posion_new_memory and poison_new_timelevels turned on?
What I am doing now is initialising the thorn in basegrid, and checking an "initialised" Cactus variable. If this is 1, then I don't do anything. If it's anything other than 1 (poison, zero, etc) then I assume the thorn has never been initialised. This is probably not an approved, elegant solution, but I expect it will work.
Well it's kind of what you have to do. You should be able to just initialize in basegrid all the time, since the basegrid values will be overwritten during checkpoint recovery as far as I remember.
Yours, Roland