Currently, making e.g. pyscal form semeio available as a forward model in ert means creating a config file, and pointing ert to it with the plugin interface method installable_jobs() (done here).

From there, it is inserted into the site config and read here:

This makes it difficult to add additional validation of the setup such as valid version number etc.

In order to remedy this, the suggestion is that the plugin interface is extended so that e.g. fm_pyscal can be implemented as a subtype of ForwardModel. The specifics of a forward model read from a config file would have to also be pushed out into subtype of ForwardModel e.g. ConfigFileForwardModel, so that ForwardModel is an abstract baseclass.

In this way the PYSCAL forward model could be implemented like this:

class Pyscal(ForwardModel):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__(
            name="PYSCAL",
            executable="fm_pyscal",
        )

    def create_arguments(self, **parameters:str) -> List[str]:
        ...

where create_arguments is responsible for handling default values and validating parameters.