Cactus' default warning level should be higher than 0.

Issue #447 new
anonymous created an issue

The perl version of simfactory always uses the debugging loglevel for simulations. The loglevel of a cactus simulation can be specified by setting -L to a value between 0 (none) and 3 (debug). While the cactus default is 0, simfactory sets it to 3. The debug loglevel could lead to huge output files.

I would suggest to set it to the cactus default, and allow a user to increase it.

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Comments (4)

  1. Ian Hinder
    • removed comment

    According to the documentation (http://cactuscode.org/documentation/referencemanual/ReferenceManualch2.html#x4-203000A2), the warning levels are:

    1. define CCTK_WARN_ABORT 0 /* abort the Cactus run */
    2. define CCTK_WARN_ALERT 1 /* the results of this run will probably */ /* be wrong, but this isn’t quite certain, */ /* so we’re not going to abort the run */
    3. define CCTK_WARN_COMPLAIN 2 /* the user should know about this, but */ /* the results of this run are probably ok */
    4. define CCTK_WARN_PICKY 3 /* this is for small problems that can */ /* probably be ignored, but that careful */ /* people may want to know about */
    5. define CCTK_WARN_DEBUG 4 /* these messages are probably useful */ /* only for debugging purposes */

    so level 3 is actually "PICKY", not "DEBUG". This means that unless something is actually wrong, or might be wrong, the warning should not be issued (in contrast to DEBUG). Usually warnings are there for a reason, and hiding them could lead to hard-to-diagnose problems. If all the warning calls in the code respected these definitions (unlikely), then possible sensible defaults for the log level would be 2 or 3. Since scientists are supposed to be "careful people", we should all be using 3, which is the current default in SimFactory :)

    The interpretation of the command line arguments is given here:

    http://cactuscode.org/documentation/usersguide/UsersGuidech7.html#x10-36000B3.1

    Actually, I would be in favour of changing the Cactus default from 0 to 3. Then we could remove the "-L 3" in simfactory as the Cactus default would be suitable. What do people think of this option?

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