User:Bhinesley/gsoc2012/search proposal

Proposal draft for adding exec option to search command (WIP)

Project Information

Summary

This project focuses on the addition of an exec option to the libged search command. The idea is similar to the exec option of the find command in Unix. Like find, search is a powerful tool for generating a list of matches of given a search pattern. However, while the search pattern may be specified using diverse criteria, there is currently no option for performing operations on the results.

Suppose major changes had recently been made to a model. search could be use to find all empty combinations (analog to directories in Unix):

search -nnodes 0

In order to remove all of the combinations returned, a user would have to either kill each one manually, or write a Tcl script to iterate over them. The former method is not feasible for a large number of results. The latter involves multiple time consuming steps. Performing operations on search results is a common enough problem that having integrated support is well worth the implementation effort:

search -nnodes 0 -exec kill {};

Command names supplied via the exec argument must map to libged functions, so that search can call them. Currently, these mappings are done outside of libged. A major milestone in this project will be creating these mappings inside libged, by having each command add itself to a registry.

While MGED and Archer themselves will eventually rely upon the libged command registry for mapping command names to functions, it is not yet clear if this migration is within the scope of the project (TBD).

Description

• code references/samples/etc.
• measurable goals

Prior commitments

The program starts three weeks before the end of my quarter, not including finals week. Most, if not all, of my classes are project-based this year. This will work to my advantage. I will be able to get the bulk of the work done ahead of schedule, minimizing the impact on the project. If there is any lost time, I will make it up in the following weeks, at a rate of +5 hours per week.