[gmx-users] making maxwarn a hidden option

[Mark Abraham]

On 30/12/2010 4:36 AM, Justin A. Lemkul wrote:
>
>
> chris.neale at utoronto.ca wrote:
>> Strongly disagreed. I use maxwarn all the time. If it was a hidden 
>> option, how would I have ever known about it? Further, if it was a 
>> hidden option, then developers would need to be very careful about 
>> throwing warnings only in the most dire situations because the 
>> general user would not know how to circumvent them. This is also not 
>> optimal.
>>
>> There are many things that one is capable of doing with gromacs that 
>> are incorrect (e.g. coupling ions to their own temperature coupling 
>> group). But there is no need to make all of these things hidden 
>> options. As you stated, there are lots of things in gromacs that 
>> really should not be used unless one knows the exact consequences of 
>> doing so.
>>
>
> I still think allowing users to blindly override a fatal error with a 
> simple command line argument is potentially dangerous, but perhaps 
> only to the person doing it.  I agree that -maxwarn can be 
> advantageous, but in the rare cases where one might need to use it, 
> that's what this list is for.  There is already a distinction between 
> "notes" and "warnings," based upon severity.  Most problems with the 
> input file are classified as "notes," I believe.
>
> Perhaps there is a solution short of completely removing the option 
> from view (although I'm still OK with that).  I have already updated 
> the wiki with the following:
>
> http://www.gromacs.org/Documentation/Errors#XXX_non-matching_atom_names
>
> Please feel free to modify as you feel would be useful.
>
> Maybe there should be some additional error information printed when 
> this comes up, like an obvious message of "Please check the order of 
> your topology relative to your coordinate file" in conjunction with 
> what is already printed.  Or, perhaps more generically, if a fatal 
> error is triggered, the user should be advised that the problem may be 
> severe enough that -maxwarn should not be employed.
>
> I agree that Gromacs shouldn't attempt to supplant the users' own 
> sense of logic, but I don't feel like informative error messages (at 
> the very least) seek to do this.

Perhaps -maxwarn could stay as it is, and when it is used, a fairly 
aggressive NOTE is printed at the bottom of the grompp output observes 
that n things were suppressed and that unless you know exactly how and 
why they arose, and thus why they can be ignored, the use of -maxwarn 
can be merely delaying the appearance of a related serious problem.

Mark