Architecture

The overall process:

• Parses pyslice.ini file. ‘self.read_config()’
• All quotes within strings in pyslice.ini are removed. ‘self.dequote()’
• All paths are corrected to match the seperator of host machine. ‘self.path_correction()’
• Create cartesian of sets for variables specified in pyslice.conf. Now handled by PySPG.
• Asks user if number of runs is appropriate. If ‘n’ then bail.
• Loops on the sets in the cartesian.
  • Loops across all files in template directory.
    • Copy any binary files, continue to next file template directory. ‘istext()’
    • For across variable names in pyslice.ini for each line in the file.
      • Replace all ‘keyword’ ‘Python statement containing variable name’ ‘keyword’ with the evaluation of the Python statement, replacing variable name with correct number from cartesian set.
      • Write out new line to correct output directory and output file.
    • If number of thread is greater than max_processes, wait.
    • Create new thread, use ‘os.popen4’ to pull output and error from the program and put in ‘pyslice.log’.

Similar Projects

Some templating systems, which I am not going to list here, might be able to be pressed into service, but it was a difficult enough prospect that I wrote Pyslice. The initial push to write Pyslice was my inability to get the Drone software installed an working. Plus Drone was way overkill for what I really needed.

Here are links to similar projects to Pyslice:

http://pyspg.sourceforge.net/: PySPG: Pyslice uses PySPG as a library to generate values.

http://droneutil.sourceforge.net/, Drone:DroneUtil - part of the Drone system.

http://drone.sourceforge.net/, Drone:Drone - I think a Drone client?

http://droned.sourceforge.net/, Drone:Droned - Drone server.

Changes

2005-08-30: v1.6 Moved to threads rather than ‘os.fork/os.exec’ which means that pyslice.py should be able to run on Windows, though not tested. Eliminated a bunch of code required by the ‘os.fork/os.exec’ that should make pyslice.py easier to maintain.

2005-06-06: v1.5 Uses ‘pyslice.ini’ instead of ‘pyslice.conf’. This allows the use of .ini editors to easily map to the correct format.

2005-05-30: v1.4 Can pull variable values from statistical distributions in Python’s ‘random’ package. Uses os.path.walk to make considerable faster. Minor code clean-up

2004-12-16: v1.3 Now depends on Python 2.x or better. Am now using the PySPG library (http://pyspg.sourceforge.net/) in order to develop the variable sets. Because of PySPG now have the capability of doing geometric and list based parameter generation.

2001-07-10: v1.1 Removed Python 2.x dependencies. Variables can now use floating point. Works correctly to just create data sets by setting max_processes = 0 in pyslice.conf. Changes to documentation.

2001-07-10: v1.0 Initial release

Authors

Tim Cera (email: tim @ cerazone dot net) Initial implementation

Claudio J. Tessone, “http://pyspg.sourceforge.net/”, PySPG library