Julian Martin Kunkel wrote:
Hi,
So I think we're mostly trying to work out what our API should really
be, whether we should extend the distro functionality vs. going totally
to hints, and if we go to hints what that API should look like, right?
probably the distribution needs a function which initializes/sets the internal
parameter depending on the string. Maybe another one which fancy writes the
parameters to a char buffer.
I'm down with that. For the record, my concern over strings isn't in
our processing them - its the users having to muck with them -
especially when passing numeric data. I just worry about lots of
mallocing/string copying blech when all you really want to do is set the
stripe size to the variable x.
I think extra mallocing is not really necessary only once to generate the
string which can be generated with snprintf the string could look
like "ioservercount=2;ioservers=node1,node4;dist=simplestripe;dist_stripesize=65536"
whereas options without the prefix "dist_" may be processed by code common to
all distributions.
Doesn't this just bring all the age old problems with text processing:
escape characters (typically backslashes), inextensible formats, etc.
I'm not opposed to it, but I can't stand custom formats. You're gonna
want some way of differentiating floats, ints, strings and vectors I
suspect.
I would say either use the same format as the server config file, or
embed an XML parser in the thing and be done with it.
For parsing my additional mpi-io hints I was able to get away with a 3
lines of regexp code. That won't be possible in more general cases I
don't think.
Cheers,
Brad
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