At the moment there are many settings in config-user.yml that users will very rarely change. Therefore I propose to reduce the number of options exposed to users in the following way:

Proposed for removal (can be moved to the recipe for those diagnostics that support these options)

• write_plots: true
• write_netcdf: true
• output_file_type: ps # [ps]/pdf/png/eps/epsi

These are options that should be implemented by diagnostic developers, so this puts a burden on diagnostic developers to implement it and in many cases it does not work, because they are either not aware of these options, or for the last option, the library they use for plotting does not support a particular plot type. The amount of time that is saved by not creating plots or netcdf files or all possible plot types is probably only a small fraction of the total runtime, so the advantage of having these settings is rather unclear, but having them creates a bad user experience because they do not work in many cases and a bad diagnostic developer experience because they have to implement and test additional requirements.

Proposed for moving to an advanced users file, e.g config-developer.yml

• profile_diagnostic: false -> only interesting for Python diagnostic developers
• save_intermediary_cubes: false -> for debugging purposes, probably only interesting for diagnostic developers
• exit_on_warning: false -> specific to NCL diagnostics, probably only interesting for diagnostic developers