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About pastebin and data files in launchpad questions

 

Hi Yade devs,
When I try to save a few minutes to answer some questions I very ofen find myself clicking here and there to access a pastebin file which is needed for a given script to run. The [pastebin|whateve|...] file can't downloaded directly in many cases. I then have to copy - which can imply substantial scrooling, paste, save in the right place, go back to terminal, run. And sometimes it is just to find that the script itself will not run, even with the proper data file.

If you want to see this cycle in action you can have a look at [1] where four posts more or less are just to sort out the data files, implying than Jan had to repeatedly reproduce the cycle mentioned above. Worth mentioning, post #11 introduces additional links for the same filenames (same content? who knows?), so it is absolutely unclear now what someone is supposed to download to simply test a script and help someone else.

I was thinking that we could go deeper in the MWE part of https://yade-dem.org/wiki/Howtoask, to push questionners toward self-contained scripts. An issue is that even among the devs I see this tendency to manipulate data files. There are a few cases where it can't be avoided, like stl mesh. But in most cases I think a data file is not needed MWE, specifically for sphere positions and clump data (which are just positions). What do you think? Does it sound realistic to ask users to avoid extra files in MWEs?

We could even provide a way to make sure that no "file not found" will occur. For instance, every mwe.py should be compatible with:
mkdir MWE
cp mwe.py ./MWE/mweTest.py
cd MWE
/path/to/yade mweTest.py
rm -rf ../MWE

Other suggestions?

Bruno

[1] https://answers.launchpad.net/yade/+question/670501

--
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Bruno Chareyre
Associate Professor
ENSE³ - Grenoble INP
Lab. 3SR
BP 53
38041 Grenoble cedex 9
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