smalers
commented
4 years ago A simple solution would be to pick a different extension and in this case "tmp" does have a lot of meaning and may be a special case. Perhaps a different extension could be adopted to avoid general confusion of whether a file contains temperature data or is a temporary file. The use of 3-character extensions is no longer required so adopting something more verbose such as "temperature" or "tempts" (for time series) would not be horrible.
A work-around is for people to configure their system tools to not treat the files as temporary, and that will vary according to software that is cleaning computers.
This also brings up a larger issue, which is whether the file extension should indicate file contents or format. For example, StateMod and StateCU have many files, each with different extensions, and potential to conflict with other extensions on a computer. The extension is a clue to the operating system for which application to open the file, based on the file format. For example, "stm" might be used for StateMod time series files and double-clicking on such a file should ideally start an application that knows what to do with the file (StateMod GUI? TSTool?). Certain file extensions might also be disallowed as email attachment or in a zip file that goes through email, although this does not seem to have been a problem.
So, should a time series file like "ddh" really be "stm" always to indicate its format, and other part of the name indicate the content? And if so, should it be "xxxx.ddh.stm", "xxxx-ddh.stm", "xxxx.ddh.stmts", "xxxx.stmddh" or something else? I suspect that the historical modeling conventions will make it difficult to change. Perhaps just need to evaluate whether any common extensions are in conflict with other uses on the computer (such as "tmp") and change those file extensions. Another one that comes to mind is "tar" which is used for reservoir target time series. A "tar" file is commonly used on Linux systems to package a list of files for distribution.
kelleythompson
macphersonbr
From Travis Zielke:
I attended a talk recently where you mentioned you were looking for feedback on the CDSS software. I’ve run into an issue recently with StateCU that could use some attention. The issue is that the temperature data for a model run is saved in a xxx.tmp file. The IT department at our company runs a file sweep before creating a backup of our servers. As part of this sweep, they delete several types of temporary files. Among those types are windows temp files, which have the extension yyy.tmp.
As a result of this, all of our completed StateCU runs are now missing the temperature data and can’t be opened. We’ve corrected this procedure by IT, however it occurs to me that we’re likely not the only firm that does this as part of our backup procedure. It would be a good idea to change the extension used to save temperature data to some other name.