abort IOUtil_TruncateOutputFiles if called too early

Issue #909 closed
Roland Haas created an issue

currently when called before the grid extension for IOUtil has been registered (which is when IOUtils learns if the is a checkpoint recovery run or not), the routine returns -1. However the documentation in the thorn guide states that

Thorn IOUtil provides an aliased function for other I/O thorns to call:
  CCTK_INT FUNCTION IO_TruncateOutputFiles (CCTK_POINTER_TO_CONST IN cctkGH)
This function simply returns 1 or 0 if output files should or should not be truncated.

Since there are thorns out there that take this to heart and test for IO_TruncateOutputFiles() being true (ie non-zero) these thorns always overwrite data during a recovery when calling IOUtils too early. This happened to Carpet in ticket #908.

The attached patch makes IOUtil abort instead which seems better than silently returning the wrong (since undocumented) answer. No actual user thorn should be affected.

Keyword: IOUtil

Comments (4)

  1. Erik Schnetter
    • changed status to open
    • removed comment

    Okay to apply.

    Could you improve the error message? People won't know what "the grid extension" is.

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