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<h1 style="text-align: center; color: blue"> ACCESS Coding Guidelines </h1>

Source Data Management for NWP the top page for NWP Source Code and Input Data Management

The Met Office style guides are available at: http://ngamai04.bom.gov.au/~access/fm_solar/docs/var_ops_src/ops30.0.0/GTDP.html

• Do not rely on users having certain settings in ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile .

  • All the necessary environment should be specified in the environmnet file envfile

• It is preferable to separate build and run suites

  • required for unit testing
  • preferred by operations

• Simple updating

  • the layout of the software is chosen to enable easy updating of components from the main development branch

• Python utilities from ACCESS_UTILS

  • The source code in ACCESS_UTILS is maintained within a directory structure

  • However my customary use has been to: check out the trunk

    flatten the trunk structure into a single directory

    include large, flat directory into $PYTHONPATH

    -- There are a few problems with this.
    

  • My (Peter Steinle) current thoughts are to run python scripts via: python ${PYTHON_DIR}/dir/script.py

    $PYTHON_DIR should be defined in envfile

      -- ${PYTHON_DIR}/dir will be included in *$PYTHONPATH* automatically
    

    A directory trunk/gen needs to be created and included in $PYTHONPATH

      -- This needs to contain files referred to from scripts in many subdirectories (e.g. *gen_args.py*)
      -- PJS to come up with a partial list for this
    

• When loading modules - explicitly include the version number

  • Defaults change, and so to reproducibility requires explicit version numbers

• Try to keep lines to no more than 80 characters wide.

  • seom remote logins are still limited

• ENVIRONMENT variables in UPPER case, local variables in lower case

• Directory names should be lower case in svn and under ~access/nwp

• (mjn) Scripts and other text files should not contain tabs (as per Met Office style guide recommendation)

• (mjn) Where possible, scripts and other text files should be limited 80 columns, especially for printing, but also for screen viewing