Converting an application directory from old to new form

Converting from 4.3 to 4.6

Some of the Clawpack 4.3 applications have not yet been converted to the form required by Clawpack 4.4 thru 4.6. This section describes how to convert from 4.3 form (before we used Python at all) to 4.6:

Note: Clawpack 5.0 will soon be available and require a new conversion. Several things are expected to substantially change.

Converting by hand

The minimal change needed to make a 4.3 application run in 4.4 (or 4.5) is to rename the clawNez.data file as claw.data and add a line to the top with a single value N, the number of space dimensions.

To take full advantage of new features available in Clawpack 4.4 you may also want to:

• Create a setrun.py file to automatically generate claw.data,
• Modify setrun.py to also create setprob.data or other data files you read in. In this case you must alse modify setprob.f to use the library routine opendatafile instead of the f77 function open as illustrated in examples. This routine skips over the warning message generated at the top of data files.
• Switch to Python graphics by creating an appropriate setplot.py file,
• Rewrite the Makefile to give options ‘make .output’, ‘make .plots’, etc.
• Create a README.txt file that has links to the various other files in this directory, that will be converted to README.html by ‘make .htmls’

Converting by script

A first pass can be done with the Python script $CLAW/python/convert43to44.py that can be found in versions of Clawpack from 4.4 to 4.6, or in the new Clawpack github repository clawpack-4.x Make sure this file is somewhere in your PYTHONPATH.

Download a copy of the the directory you want to convert (or make a copy of your own 4.3 application directory).

Go into this directory and type:

python convert43to44.py

This should do most of the work for you. In particular it will create:

• setrun.py that uses the parameters found in the old clawNez.data file.

• setplot.py that creates a basic set of plots, one for each component of the system. This does not use the old Matlab setplotN.m script (if there is one in this directory) to try to mimic the plots that were originally made.

• Makefile with appropriate pointers to the new source code locations.

• README.txt with some pointers to the files, suitable for use with the

  make .htmls command.

Some things to watch out for:

• This only works for classic Clawpack, not for AMR or GeoClaw applications.

• If there is a file setprob.data that is read in by setprob.f, this file will still be here but will not be generated automatically by what’s in setrun.py. If you want it to be, you should modify the section of setrun.py that starts with:

  probdata = rundata.new_UserData(...)
  

  Call probdata.add_param for each parameter in the setprob.data file. This currently only works if there is one parameter per line, so setprob.f might need to be rewritten.

• If you want to make fancier plots, you will need to modify setplot.py appropriately.

• The file README.txt has been created based on a basic template but may not have pointers to the actual *.f files in this directory. It also has not taken into account any old README file that might have been in the directory.