[Developers] cactus feature request: source code saves

[Steve White]

How about having it store the results of a cvs diff?

Oh...you went and used darcs.

Well, this is still a better idea.  For one thing it tells you 
straightaway how the source was changed from the standard.  And it
would be vastly smaller....

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve White : Programmer
Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik      Albert-Einstein-Institut
Am Mühlenberg 1, D-14476 Golm, Germany                  +49-331-567-7625

On Tue, 24 May 2005, Erik Schnetter wrote:

> 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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