ActiveConfigProgramOptions Python Module

Overview

The ActiveConfigProgramOptions package extends the ActiveConfigParser package by adding additional operations for handling command-line options. The general use-case behind this tool is to allow a section inside a .ini file to be used to generate a command line option for some application. Specifically, we were working with generating configurations for a CMake based project with hundreds of configuration options. We wanted a tool that would allow us to encode different configurations while also havng base configurations to reduce replication of standard command lines as those can be difficult to maintain once the number of different configurations becomes large.

The primary use case that provided the impetus to develop ActiveConfigProgramOptions was to support complex configuration environments for a software project that is tested on a variety of platforms and architectures, including GPUs and HPC systems. This project is several million lines of code and has hundreds of CMake options in its configuration space.

We developed ActiveConfigProgramOptions and ActiveConfigProgramOptionsCMake to allow our build system to use optimized .ini files to manage our configuration space.

This package includes two classes:

1. ActiveConfigProgramOptions - A general purpose command line handler that handles generic command line options.

2. ActiveConfigProgramOptionsCMake - A subclass of ActiveConfigProgramOptions, this class further extends ActiveConfigProgramOptions by adding CMake-specific operations to provide ease of use for CMake specific options. It also adds an additional generator option to allow the generation of either bash style command line options or a CMake source fragment file.

An example .ini file using ActiveConfigProgramOptions might look like:

1[Directory *nix]
2opt-set ls

This configuration is the ActiveConfigProgramOptions version of a hello world example. Here, the opt-set ls option is specifying a single command line option which in this case is the command ls.

We can expand this to add additional entries:

1[Directory *nix]
2opt-set ls
3opt-set -l
4opt-set -r
5opt-set -t
6opt-remove -r

When processed, this example would result in a concactenated string containing the command ls -l -t. We threw in the opt-remove -r operation which removed the -r entry.

Quick Start

See the Quick Start guide for a more comprehensive starting tutorial and the Examples for additional use case examples.

Test Coverage

Coverage Report