| 1 | | = General CMT FAQ = |
| 2 | | |
| 3 | | by V.Garonne [[BR]] |
| 4 | | Date: 05.4.2005 [[BR]] |
| 5 | | Version : 0.1 [[BR]] |
| 6 | | Web site: [http://www.cmtsite.org/ http://www.cmtsite.org/] [[BR]] |
| 7 | | |
| 8 | | = General Information = |
| 9 | | |
| 10 | | == What is CMT ? == |
| 11 | | |
| 12 | | [http://www.cmtsite.org/ CMT](__C__onfiguration __M__anagement __T__ool) is a configuration management environment, based on some management conventions and comprises several shell-based utilities. It is an attempt to formalize software production and especially configuration management around a package-oriented principle. |
| 13 | | |
| 14 | | The environment provides conventions (for naming packages, files, directories and for addressing them) and tools for automating as much as possible the implementation of these conventions. It permits to describe the configuration requirements and automatically deduce from the description the effective set of configuration parameters needed to operate the packages (typically for building them or using them). |
| 15 | | |
| 16 | | == What is a package ? == |
| 17 | | |
| 18 | | The notion of packages represents hereafter a set of software components (that may be applications, libraries, tools etc...) that are to be used for producing a system or a framework. In such an environment, several persons are assumed to participate in the development and the components themselves are either independent or related to each other. |
| 19 | | |
| 20 | | == How to install CMT ? == |
| 21 | | |
| 22 | | See: [http://www.cmtsite.org/install.html Install] |
| 23 | | |
| 24 | | == Are there copyright restrictions on the use of CMT ? == |
| 25 | | |
| 26 | | Not really. CMT is provided as an Open-Source product, with available sources, and is opened to any contribution from anybody. |
| 27 | | |
| 28 | | See the license page [http://www.cecill.info/licences.en.html agreement] to find further explanations and a link to the full text of the license. |
| 29 | | |
| 30 | | == How do I get documentation on CMT ? == |
| 31 | | |
| 32 | | All documentation is available on-line, starting at [http://www.cmtsite.org/documents.html Documents]. |
| 33 | | |
| 34 | | == Is there a mailing list devoted to CMT ? == |
| 35 | | |
| 36 | | There is a mailing list, [http://www.cmtsite.org/discussion.html mailing list]. |
| 37 | | |
| 38 | | == I've never used CMT before. Is there a CMT tutorial? == |
| 39 | | |
| 40 | | There are numerous tutorials avalaible here: |
| 41 | | |
| 42 | | * [http://www.cmtsite.org/documents.html Documents] |
| 43 | | |
| 44 | | * [http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/SOFTWARE/OO/sit/Policy/ Atlas and CMT] |
| 45 | | |
| 46 | | * [wiki:VincentTrial How do i begin playing with CMT ?] |
| 47 | | |
| 48 | | == How do I submit bug reports for CMT ? == |
| 49 | | |
| 50 | | To report a bug, please use the relevant service from the Trac project. |
| 51 | | |
| 52 | | * Bugs: [http://trac.lal.in2p3.fr/CMT/newticket New Ticket] |
| 53 | | |
| 54 | | |
| 55 | | = CMT in the real world = |
| 56 | | |
| 57 | | == How stable is CMT ? == |
| 58 | | |
| 59 | | Very stable (of course :) ). |
| 60 | | |
| 61 | | == How many people are using Python ? == |
| 62 | | |
| 63 | | CMT is an academic project aimed at providing support to the software developments in the context of large physics experiments ([http://atlas.web.cern.ch atlas],[[BR]][http://lhcb.web.cern.ch/lhcb/ lhcb], ...). |
| 64 | | |
| 65 | | Although it is currently used by Physics experiments, it is strongly required to stay experiment neutral, and this requirements is fully endorsed in its internal design (eg by ensuring that all possible customizations can always be performed without modifications to the kernel). |
| 66 | | |
| 67 | | This kind of requirements also implies that portability or modularity issues (including environment independance) are assigned a quite high priority. |
| 68 | | |
| 69 | | == What are the supported platforms ? == |
| 70 | | |
| 71 | | CMT has been ported and tested on a wide range of machines/operating systems, including: |
| 72 | | |
| 73 | | * DEC-Unix V4.0 |
| 74 | | * HP-UX-10 (several types of platforms) |
| 75 | | * AIX-4 |
| 76 | | * Solaris |
| 77 | | * IRIX |
| 78 | | * Several variants of LynxOS |
| 79 | | * All variants of Linux (RedHat, Debian, SuSe, ScientificLinux, ...) |
| 80 | | * Windows 95/98/NT/Windows2000 in various environments: |
| 81 | | * CYGWIN_NT-5.1 environment |
| 82 | | * nmake based environment |
| 83 | | * MSDev/VisualC 6 environment |
| 84 | | * MSDev/VisualC 7 environment |
| 85 | | * Darwin (Mac OS X) |
| 86 | | |
| 87 | | == CMT's design == |
| 88 | | |
| 89 | | = What are the architecture of the environment ? = |
| 90 | | This environment is based on the fact that one of its packages (named CMT ) provides the basic |
| 91 | | management tools. CMT , as a package, has very little specificities and as such itself obeys the |
| 92 | | general conventions. |
| 93 | | Then the complete software base is organized in terms of projects (or sub-projects ), containing |
| 94 | | consistently managed package sets. Projects are localized either globally or individually: |
| 95 | | globally using the environment variable CMTPROJECTPATH that describes all locations |
| 96 | | where CMT projects can be found individually using the environment variable CMTPATH that describe all package areas where packages can be found Packages are localized respectively to the projects they belong to. |
| 97 | | It should be noted that the choice of a location for installing CMT itself is totally independent of |
| 98 | | the locations where projects are installed and managed. |
| 99 | | |
| 100 | | CMT is operated through one main user interface : the cmt command, which operates the CMT |
| 101 | | conventions and which provides a set of services for : |
| 102 | | * creating a new package. This operation will create or check the local package directory tree and generate several minimal scripts (see the description of the create command), |
| 103 | | * describing or monitoring : |
| 104 | | * the relationships between the package and other packages |
| 105 | | * the configuration features either specified in the current package, or imported from related (used ) ones. (symbols, patterns, fragments) |
| 106 | | * the constituents of the package in terms of libraries, executables, or generated documents. |
| 107 | | * automatically generating the reconstruction scripts (makefiles ) from this description. |
| 108 | | * recursively acting upon the hierarchy of used packages. |
| 109 | | |
| 110 | | Several other utilities are also provided for some specific activities (such as the automatic |
| 111 | | production of shared libraries, C prototypes, management of interactions between CVS and CMT |
| 112 | | itself, the management of a similar architecture for Windows or OS9 , setting up protections for |
| 113 | | packages (through locks) etc...). |
| 114 | | |
| 115 | | = User FAQ = |
| 116 | | |
| 117 | | == How to create a package ? == |
| 118 | | |
| 119 | | cmt create <package_name> <version> |
| 120 | | |
| 121 | | == Does the "requirements" file support comments ? == |
| 122 | | |
| 123 | | Yes. A comment starts with a hash character (#) that is not part of a string literal, and ends at the end of the physical line. |
