On May 8, 2008, at 9:32 AM, Josh Hursey wrote:
I think 'all' would be a nice symmetric addition to complement 'none' and then this would allow users to specify the "select best from all available" option on the command line.
Ok, if you accept "all" and "none" as friendly ammendments to your RFC, I think I'm done with input there. :-)
Any other comments on the RFC?
Disallowing the NULL default string I think would have some repercussions throughout the code requiring a change in the way we use MCA parameters. For example, many component selection logics use the NULL value as the current 'select best from all' indicator. Other MCA parameters take the NULL value to indicate that the user did not set any value for this string parameter and thus it can be ignored. Maybe we can try to add a deprecation warning message when this happens to gauge it's frequency.
There's no burning need to do this ASAP; let's add this to the list of items to talk about in the tech meeting. Perhaps one of us could do a little prep before the meeting to figure out:
- how often NULL is given as a default OMPI MCA string param (probably quite often) -- easy enough to find out by putting a counter/ opal_output in the string registration function
- how often NULL is *required* by the logic for one reason or another (probably a little more tricky to count)
-- Jeff Squyres Cisco Systems
