Configuration Management Tool(CMT) Frequently Asked Questions(FAQ)

Author: V.Garonne <garonne@…>, and ...
Date: 05.4.2005
Version : 0.1
Web site: ​http://www.cmtsite.org/

Abstract

This FAQ document covers all areas of the CMT project, and mostly contains distilled information from the official documents, personal experiences, and more or less general issues. It contains an overview over the project itself and it's paradigms, as well as a user and dellopers section.

IMPORTANT: This FAQ is not completed and still under construction. Some answers are still missing.

Table of Contents

1. Abstract
2. General Information
   1. What is CMT?
   2. What is a package?
   3. How to install CMT?
   4. Are there copyright restrictions on the use of CMT?
   5. How do I get documentation on CMT?
   6. Is there a mailing list devoted to CMT?
   7. I've never used CMT before. Is there a CMT tutorial?
   8. How do I submit bug reports for CMT?
3. CMT in the real world
   1. How stable is CMT?
   2. How many people are using Python?
   3. What are the supported platforms?
4. CMT's design
   1. What are the architecture of the environment?
5. User FAQ
   1. Do I have to be root?
   2. How to create a package?
   3. Does the "requirements" file support comments?
   4. How do I configure CMT to work with CVS?
   5. How do I configure CMT to work with Pacman?
   6. Is newest CMT version compatible with previous versions?
   7. How do I add a new version to a project?
   8. What are the CMT commands ?
   9. I've got a question that is not answered here. Who can I ask?
6. developers FAQ
   1. How can I become a developer?
   2. I've made some changes to the source code. Where can I submit them?

General Information

What is CMT?

​CMT(Configuration Management Tool) 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.

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).

What is a package?

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.

How to install CMT?

See: ​Install

Are there copyright restrictions on the use of CMT?

Not really. CMT is provided as an Open-Source product, with available sources, and is opened to any contribution from anybody.

See the license page ​agreement to find further explanations and a link to the full text of the license.

How do I get documentation on CMT?

All documentation is available on-line, starting at ​Documents.

Is there a mailing list devoted to CMT?

There is a mailing list, ​mailing list.

I've never used CMT before. Is there a CMT tutorial?

There are numerous tutorials avalaible here:

• ​Documents

• ​Atlas and CMT

• How do i begin playing with CMT?

How do I submit bug reports for CMT?

To report a bug, please use the relevant service from the Trac project.

• Bugs: New Ticket

CMT in the real world

How stable is CMT?

Very stable (of course :) ).

How many people are using Python?

CMT is an academic project aimed at providing support to the software developments in the context of large physics experiments (​atlas,
​lhcb, ...).

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).

This kind of requirements also implies that portability or modularity issues (including environment independance) are assigned a quite high priority.

What are the supported platforms?

CMT has been ported and tested on a wide range of machines/operating systems, including:

• DEC-Unix V4.0
• HP-UX-10 (several types of platforms)
• AIX-4
• Solaris
• IRIX
• Several variants of LynxOS
• All variants of Linux (RedHat, Debian, SuSe, ScientificLinux, ...)
• Windows 95/98/NT/Windows2000 in various environments:
  • CYGWIN_NT-5.1 environment
  • nmake based environment
  • MSDev/VisualC 6 environment
  • MSDev/VisualC 7 environment
• Darwin (Mac OS X)

CMT's design

What are the architecture of the environment?

This environment is based on the fact that one of its packages (named CMT ) provides the basic management tools. CMT , as a package, has very little specificities and as such itself obeys the general conventions. Then the complete software base is organized in terms of projects (or sub-projects ), containing consistently managed package sets. Projects are localized either globally or individually: globally using the environment variable CMTPROJECTPATH that describes all locations 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. It should be noted that the choice of a location for installing CMT itself is totally independent of the locations where projects are installed and managed.

CMT is operated through one main user interface : the cmt command, which operates the CMT conventions and which provides a set of services for :

• 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),
• describing or monitoring :
  • the relationships between the package and other packages
  • the configuration features either specified in the current package, or imported from related (used ) ones. (symbols, patterns, fragments)
  • the constituents of the package in terms of libraries, executables, or generated documents.
• automatically generating the reconstruction scripts (makefiles ) from this description.
• recursively acting upon the hierarchy of used packages.

Several other utilities are also provided for some specific activities (such as the automatic production of shared libraries, C prototypes, management of interactions between CVS and CMT itself, the management of a similar architecture for Windows or OS9 , setting up protections for packages (through locks) etc...).

User FAQ

Do I have to be root?

You don't have to be root to use CMT.

How to create a package?

cmt create <package_name> <version>

Does the "requirements" file support comments?

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.

How do I configure CMT to work with CVS?

How do I configure CMT to work with Pacman?

Is newest CMT version compatible with previous versions?

How do I add a new version to a project?

What are the CMT commands ?

I've got a question that is not answered here. Who can I ask?

If your question is a general question about CMT have a look at the main ​Documents. After that, your best audience is probably the CMT ​mailing list.

If your question is specific ,then send email to the xxxx@…, and we'll do our best to help you.

developers FAQ

How can I become a developer?

I've made some changes to the source code. Where can I submit them?