Should we move xcpl_comps_nuopc out of CIME?

[billsacks]

In my work to add water tracers to CMEPS, I've been making numerous changes in the NUOPC X components, which I've been using for initial testing. These components are currently inside CIME, and so I'll be opening a PR soon with these changes. I've been wondering if we should move these X comps outside of CIME - either to within the CMEPS repository (which would probably be my preference, since they are pretty closely tied to testing CMEPS) or to their own repository.

What do others think about this - @jedwards4b @fischer-ncar @mvertens or others?

I also thought briefly about moving the stub_comps_nuopc out of CIME, but since (for NUOPC/CMEPS) those just consist of some stub Python and XML code, they actually feel more tied to CIME than to CMEPS, so it kind of makes sense to me to keep them where they are. (And I think that moving them would require some coordination between different components to update their config_files, since I think it might be important for any component that has a config_files to agree on where the stub components exist, though I haven't explored that carefully.)

[mvertens]

@billsacks - I think moving the NUOPC X components outside of CIME makes a lot of sense.

[jedwards4b]

Okay with me.

[billsacks]

I have done this via #4946 and ESCOMP/CMEPS#637