Contractor

Overview

Contractor is a system for building dependent sets of packages. It differs from a simple build script in that builds can be stopped, restarted, adjusted and updated. The packages are installed in a communal directory ("install"); a setup script ("setup.sh") to add the relevant subdirectories to the appropriate paths is generated by Contractor.

Contractor breaks a build into many stages called *nodes*. (Contractor maintains an internal directed acyclic graph where the build stages and dependencies are the nodes and edges, respectively.) Some nodes are convenience entries, such as "clean." Since the build contains many nodes, most of which are not directly interesting to the end user, only a subset of nodes most likely to be invoked separately are labeled *targets*.

Simple Usage

./contract.py --configure
./contract.py

will configure the default options and build the default target.

Getting Help

./contract.py --help

lists the help options.

Configuration

Configuration options are cumulative. If the default value of "foo" is 1 and the default value of "bar" is 2, the initial

    ./contract.py --configure

will set foo=1 and bar=2. If we then type

     ./contract.py --configure foo=3

we would have foo=3 and bar=2. If we then wanted to change bar, we could do

     ./contract.py --configure bar=4

which would leave us with foo=3 and bar=4. A subsequent

    ./contract.py --configure

still leaves foo=3 and bar=4. In order to return to the defaults, we would have to do

    ./contract.py --configure-reset

which would return us to foo=1, bar=2.

Source

Most recent (Nov 13, 2006) tarball

n.b. Distribution tarballs created by contractor include contractor itself. The tarballs below do not necessarily have the very most recent version of contractor, but the differences with the current version should be minimal.

Synergia2 example

(Diagram only. Distribution available upon request.)

CHEF example

(Diagram only. Distribution available upon request.)

Last update: 11-14-2006