[MITgcm-devel] instruction about downloading

[Martin Losch]

Ed,
thanks for taking care of this. I agree with you that my colleague was 
not very careful with reading the docs, but as you pointed out, that's 
just typical of "users" in general (when did I read the documentation 
to a software tool *before* starting it at least once in order to get 
around reading docs at all? I can't remember ...).

Martin

On Sep 29, 2005, at 2:30 PM, Ed Hill wrote:

> On Thu, 2005-09-29 at 11:15 +0200, Martin Losch wrote:
>> Hi there,
>>
>> you probably discussed this already in one of your doc-fest meeings 
>> (or
>> another time), but when I asked a collegue this morning to follow the
>> instruction on
>> http://mitgcm.org/using_cvs.html
>> and download the code, she did this:
>> cvs co MITgcm_contrib
>> (which, of course is not what you can read on the web-page, but "cvs 
>> co
>> MITgcm MITgcm_contrib")
>>
>> Do the instructions suggest checking out *both* MITgcm and
>> MITgcm_contrib? I don't think that a first time user is really
>> interested in the contrib and you get a lot of stuff from
>> MITgcm_contrib, or is this a singular opinion?
>
> Hi Martin,
>
> The "quick" instructions that people should always see first are:
>
>   http://mitgcm.org/source_code.html
>
> and they have for a long time just recommended the simple "cvs co
> MITgcm".  And I've now edited the more detailed directions at
>
>   http://mitgcm.org/using_cvs.html
>
> to make it *very* clear what the recommended commands are, what they 
> do,
> and why you probably want to avoid downloading the full MITgcm_contrib.
>
> Ed
>
> ps - The docs at the second link have for a long time *CLEARLY*
> described how the full "cvs co MITgcm MITgcm_contrib" was overkill for
> most people and showed various ways to reduce the volume of stuff
> downloaded.  Whoever did what you described obviously didn't put much
> effort into reading the docs.  But thats typical.
>
> -- 
> Edward H. Hill III, PhD
> office:  MIT Dept. of EAPS;  Rm 54-1424;  77 Massachusetts Ave.
>              Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
> emails:  eh3 at mit.edu                ed at eh3.com
> URLs:    http://web.mit.edu/eh3/    http://eh3.com/
> phone:   617-253-0098
> fax:     617-253-4464
>
> _______________________________________________
> MITgcm-devel mailing list
> MITgcm-devel at mitgcm.org
> http://mitgcm.org/mailman/listinfo/mitgcm-devel