[Developers] cactus feature request: source code saves

[Erik Schnetter]

On Sunday 22 May 2005 13:28, Denis Pollney wrote:
> Hi,
> I had some discussion with frank and erik yesterday regarding the
> reproducability of runs. We often introduce small changes to the code
> we're running in our local directories without commiting them to CVS,
> since we're just trying something out. We then might later use the
> same source tree, forgetting that it is slightly modified.
>
> Ideally each run output directory should have a copy of the source
> code that was used to produce the output.
>
> The easiest thing to do would be to just record the entire source
> tree with each run. This means an overhead of more than 200Mb of
> data, which for runs with high I/O is no big deal, but for hundreds
> of small runs would start to add up. And it's a waste, given that
> most of the recorded source will be identical.

There is now a rough implementation of this in thorn 
AEIThorns/Formaline.  If you want to try this, compile Formaline into 
your executable and activate it at run time.  So far, it works on my 
local machine, and the code might need some refinement to work on all 
architectures.

The working principle is as follows.  When thorn Formaline is compiled, 
it creates a tarball of all source code that goes into the executable, 
excluding test cases and documentation.  This tarball is of the order 
of 10 MB large.  This tarball is also stored in the executable.  When 
thorn Formaline is activated at run time, the source tarball is written 
into the output directory.

There is also an example parameter file that makes the executable do 
nothing but output the tarball.

Tentative future plans include storing the source code, suitably 
compactified, in a common area, such that one can delete the output 
directory and still have access to the source code, even if just a 
single output file survives.

-erik

-- 
Erik Schnetter <schnetter at aei.mpg.de>   http://www.aei.mpg.de/~eschnett/

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