Sumatra 0.5.0 release notes
February 18th 2013
Welcome to Sumatra 0.5.0!
Overview
Sumatra 0.5 development has mostly been devoted to polishing. There were a bunch
of small improvements, with contributions from several new contributors. The
Bitbucket pull request workflow seemed to work well for this. The main changes
are:
- working directory now captured (as a parameter of LaunchMode);
- data differences are now based on content, not name, i.e. henceforth two files
with identical content but different names (e.g. because the name contains a
timestamp) will evaluate as being the same;
- improved error messages when a required version control wrapper is not
installed;
- dependencies now capture the source from which the version was obtained
(e.g. repository url);
- YAML-format parameter files are now supported (thanks to Tristan Webb);
- added “upstream” attribute to the Repository class, which may contain
the URL of the repository from which your local repository was cloned;
- added MirroredFileSystemDataStore, which supports the case where files
exist both on the local filesystem and on some web server (e.g. DropBox);
- the name/e-mail of the user who launched the computation is now captured
(first trying ~/.smtrc, then the version control system);
- there is now a choice of methods for auto-generating labels when they are not
supplied by the user: timestamp-based (the default and previously the only
option) and uuid-based. Use the “-g” option to smt configure;
- you can also specify the timestamp format to use (thanks to Yoav Ram);
- improved API reference documentation.
Interfaces to documentation systems
The one big addition to Sumatra is a set of tools to include figures and other
results generated by Sumatra-tracked computations in documents, with links to
full provenance information: i.e. the full details of the code, input data and
computational environment used to generate the figure/result.
The following tools are available:
- for reStructuredText/Sphinx: an “smtlink” role and “smtimage” directive.
- for LaTeX, a “sumatra” package, which provides the “\smtincludegraphics” command.
see Reproducible publications: including and linking to provenance information in documents for more details.
