JW – I think this is a good idea. JC has indicated as much
LW – It’d be helpful to have a warning if multiple parameters ahve ientical SMIRKS
MT – Two qs: should this be allowed? (seems to be yes) and which parameter wins (should be later). And should both decisions be upstreamed into the spec?
LW – Last parameter wins should be in the spec.
MT – I think I looked a year ago and couldn’t find it clearly stated.
DM – We should double check.
https://openforcefield.github.io/standards/standards/smirnoff/#smirnoff-parameter-specification-is-hierarchical
LW – If we do merge this behavior PR, I’d be in favor of explicitly saying that later match wins even if SMIRKS are identical.
MT – Agree, should be a small change.
JW – Current planned behavior change is to have last parameter win if there are identical smirks, and to allow duplicate SMIRKS in (so avoid raising DuplicateParameterError) in ParameterHAndler.add_parameter.
MT – Right now users can silene specific warnings, or turn warnings into errors, so I don’t think we should add a new argument to the add_parameter API.
LW – Right now the add_parameter API raises an error that you can catch with try/except, but then the parameter isn’t added.
Mt – I don’t want downstream warnings to be something that the toolkit takes the responsibility for handling.
…
MT – So right now duplicate parameters can come in via file loading and FF concatenation. So I’d assumed thatthis was also allowed when using the API to add parameters. But I see that the current state of the API is that duyplicate paramters aren’t allowed at all, and this change would optionally allow them.