[ncl-talk] Policy on support for contributed code

[Simon Read]

Dear NCL team and users,

I'm new NCL user, working in academia, who is evalauting a software package that is largely based on NCL. 

This post is about the culture of NCL rather than a technical issue, but I hope you don't mind me posting it here. Specifically, but I have a couple of questions about present and future support for contributed code, i.e. those functions and procedures loaded from:

$NCARG_ROOT/lib/ncarg/nclscripts/csm/contributed.ncl

Q1) I'm sure the contributed code is very reliable, but in the unlikely event a bug was identified, would it be the responsibility of the NCL development team to fix it, or the contributing author?

Q2) Is it the intention to keep all the existing contributed functions and procedures in future NCL distributions for the foreseeable future? Put conversely, may some contributed functions and procedures be left out of future NCL versions, e.g. due to the presence of better alternatives, or incompatibility with other code in the new version?

Many thanks in advance for any advice you can give.

Kind regards,
Simon