Test suite results are unwieldy

They consume disk space, they consume time when downloading and when copying to a remote machine. People view them as "unimportant" (when compared to source files), and are generally annoyed. What can we do about this?

Some suggestions include:

• Do nothing; explain to people that test suite results are very important to ensure correctness, tell them to suffer through transmit times and ask for larger quota
• * That's not a solution.
• Con't copy test suite results to remote machines by default; only copy them when requested
• * This makes it more difficult to run the test suite, which should (ideally) be run every time a new executable has been created for a production run.
• tar/gzip test suite results to save disk space, possibly also storing them this way in the SVN repository
• * This doesn't save transmit time (since rsync already compresses), and (if used in the repository) doesn't allow delta compression
• Combine test suite results from different source trees into a single directory (with soft links or hard links or similarly)
• * This would be an extra step that runs after all files are there, already consuming disk space.
• Use HDF5 instead of ASCII
• * Binary files are not well handled by SVN.
• Combine several ASCII files into one (fewer files are handled more efficiently), e.g. designing a simple ASCII container format for test cases, or even using this format in CarpetIOASCII
• * Wouldn't save disk space.
• Use a different ASCII format that doesn't store 13 columns for 1 data field
• * Maybe we could use the ygraph format?