yade-dev team mailing list archive

[Bruno Chareyre <bruno.chareyre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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
Tél : +33 4 56 52 86 21
Fax : +33 4 76 82 70 43
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