[Swift-devel] Proposed sites.xml management for 0.92 release

[Michael Wilde]

Based on discussions in the last 2 weekly meetings, I want to propose this for 0.92, based on Justin's page http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/wiki/bin/view/SWFT/CoastersCookbook under "Script snippets".

Im proposing here a few name changes, specific file location conventions, but basically staying in the spirit of Justin's scripts.

gensites.sh -> etc/gensites
settings.sh -> merged into a local swift.properties file

The swift command "sites" will generate a sites.xml file in the current directory based on the users "site settings" (obtained from swift.properties) and one or more template files that are provided in the Swift release and which can be augmented with the user's own template collection(s).

User selects a site template from $SWIFT/etc/sites

gensites templates >sites.xml

gensites -p sites.properties templates >sites.xml

gensites -L template.dir templates >sites.xml

The user typically runs gensites only once per run directory

Templates are searched for in the following locations:

- current directory
- etc/sites in the Swift directory
- $HOME/.swift/sites in the user's home directory
- any -L directories specified on the gensites command line

The user's sites-related properties are obtained from:

- sites.properties in the current directory
- the -p file specified on the gensites command line
- $HOME/.swift/sites.properties
- $HOME/.swift/swift.properties lines with starting with #site

Obviously the fine details of this need to be nailed down; there's some room for discussion for how simple and/or flexible to make this.  As long as the search and editing rules are clearly stated, I think users will be well served and happy.

Each template should have comments describing its use, nature, and user-changeable settings and defaults.

The command should flag required parameters that were not specified in the user's settings.  The generated sites.xml file could contain comments stating where the options and templates came from.

Im putting this text in:

  http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/wiki/bin/view/SWFT/GenSites

and we can document specific site file templates in:

  http://www.ci.uchicago.edu/wiki/bin/view/SWFT/SiteFiles

- Mike


-- 
Michael Wilde
Computation Institute, University of Chicago
Mathematics and Computer Science Division
Argonne National Laboratory