Repository for ESMValTool Advanced topics tutorial

[rswamina]

Dear @ESMValGroup/esmvaltool-developmentteam , the @ESMValGroup/userengagementteam is organizing an advanced topics tutorial on April 23rd. This will involved writing a new diagnostic. Often not everyone attending has a ready diagnostic to push into the repository so we are unable to fully support an end-to-end writing of a diagnostic. Is there some way that new users can experiment with creating a pull request, going through code tests and so on to get a full workflow experience even without a ready diagnostic to add? By this I mean not a new science diagnostic for the repository but that they will have some sample code that say caluclates mean or osmething simple.
Could something be done by creating a small training repository or something like that? It would be useful to have something like that in place for this and the next advanced tutorial plan to learn about CMOR-ization. Please let us know.
Ideas welcome from the @ESMValGroup/userengagementteam as well.
Thanks!
-Ranjini

[bouweandela]

Hi Ranjini,

Here are two possible solutions, probably best to use both, depending on what training particpants wish to practice:

• We use the main ESMValTool repo and add a training or similar label to pull requests/issues that are part of the training. The training participants take care of closing their own issues/pull requests if they find that they are no longer relevant at the end of the training. This has the advantage the all the CI checks will run and training partipants get the "real" experience and you can explain the various checks to them during the training.
• Participants fork ESMValTool to their own account by clicking the 'Fork' button and then they can make issues/pull requests in their own fork. This allows for more freedom with experimenting, but has the downside that CI services will probably not run.

[rswamina]

I like the first option as it is simpler to do.