The philosophy behind recipes is that they are as explicit as possible, so e.g. all datasets should be fully written out so it is clear what the recipe actually computes (and with which datasets it actually works).

However, this is not very user-friendly for people writing recipes and can become difficult to read too. See e.g. the requests for the use of wildcards '*' for specifying datasets in ESMValGroup/ESMValTool#671, #589, and #1082. A 'recipe filler' tool was also developed to deal with this.

Maybe we could compromise by allowing this kind of feature, but only accepting recipes that do not contain wildcards in the ESMValTool repository? For easy reproducibility, we could write out a copy of the recipe with all wildcards replaced by actual datasets in the output directory? Any opinions @ESMValGroup/esmvaltool-coreteam?

Maybe this is something for discussion at the next monthly meeting ESMValGroup/ESMValTool#2173 or one of the upcoming @ESMValGroup/technical-lead-development-team or @ESMValGroup/scientific-lead-development-team meetings?