[Swift-devel] Suggestions for improvements to gensites

[David Kelly]

A few people had started discussing this off-line, but I thought it would be
useful to continue the conversation on swift-devel. Does anyone have any
ideas for improving or simplifying gensites?

The way it works right now is described at
http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/wiki/bin/view/SWFT/GenSites. I think this is
powerful and flexible, but not necessarily easy for new users.

My idea to simplify the process is to allow new users to run 'gensites' with
no command line options and without having to first create any configuration
files. When they run it with no arguments, they are presented with a series
of prompts. It will print out a list of all the templates available.  They
should see the commonly used machines right away. It will then ask for the
name of their project, the queue and work directory. Once it has the info,
It will print a working sites.xml. The user would copy/paste that and run
swift with -sites.file. That step would hopefully be well documented in the
new user guide. The prompts would be similar to what swiftconfig had, but a
little more simplified.

Regards,
David
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