Use of '-S <variable>' doesn't seem to get covered well.

[r-sharp]

The following question arose on the "model systems" Teams chat to ask :

Does anyone know how I can run the cylc8 test-suite on XCS? there seems to be a METO_USE_XCS variable in the variables.cylc file but can't work out how to set it for a run.

Last time I remember, I thought it was settable from the top rose-suite.conf in rose stem? I thought it was supposed to be there, but defaulted to false

The answer was -S METO_USE_XCS=true, and the following appears in the wiki pages for testing lfric_apps.

Other command line options are also available for the rose stem command:

• --source= This specifies the path to an lfric_core source. This can be either an fcm url or a path to a working copy. The source variable currently can only be used for the lfric_core source - others, eg. UM, will need to be set in the dependencies.sh file. To use, it, use the syntax as --source=. --source=fcm:lfric.xm_tr for the lfric_core trunk. The inclusion of the first source is required.

• -S This can set a value for any jinja2 variable in the [template variables] section of the rose-suite.conf. Currently available options are below.
  • -S HOUSEKEEPING=<true/false>, with the default value as true. -S HOUSEKEEPING=false will turn off the Housekeeping tasks.
  • -S METO_USE_XCS=<false/true>, with the default value as false. -S METO_USE_XCS=true will run the test suite on Cray XCS instead of XCE/F (please note that the task names will still contain xc40).
  • -S OVERRIDE_LOG_LEVEL="info", which sets the logging level to "info" for all jobs. The default depends on the build of the job (e.g. fast-debug jobs are usually at "info", and full-debug are at "debug".

However, the link to those wiki pages is a bit buried, and it might be nice to think about putting that information somewhere more readily to hand in this repository. Be that generically at the "testing your change" level, or more specifically for each model at the "Testing " level