DEVAL

a project that sets up other projects for evaluation by DECAF

Environment Setup

There are two different ways to get your environment setup to work with DEVAL. It involves adding a couple environment variables to your system so that DEVAL knows where to look for certain stuff. Namely, you are going to need to set $DEVAL and $DEVALSUB for your environment.

The $DEVAL variable is the top-level directory for the DEVAL project. The $DEVALSUB variable specifies the directory that will be used to by DEVAL as the top-level directory for setting up all of the subjects for evaluation. So, if you decide to invoke the setup script for Example1, it will setup Example1 in the $DEVALSUB directory that you have specified.

Manually Export Environment Variables

Set the environment variable for the location of DEVAL and the DEVAL subjects:

export DEVAL=/absolute/path/for/deval
export DEVALSUB=/absolute/path/for/deval/devalsub

Add Environment Variables to Bash/Zsh Configuration (preferred)

Rather than typing in the above environment variables manually and making sure they are always set, you can just add them to your bash or zsh configurations so that they are always set for your environment. To do this, go to your home directory, find the .bashrc or .zshrc file depending on which shell environment you prefer, open it up, and add the following lines to that file:

export DEVAL=/absolute/path/for/deval
export DEVALSUB=/absolute/path/for/deval/devalsub

Buiding a Scenario

In order to quickly generate a scenario, there is some information that needs to be specified and a few configuration files that need to be created.

Specifying the Directory Structure

Creating a directory structure for the example and/or scenario is tedious to do manually. To expedite this part of the process, we have a script, dirify.py, that will generate a directory structure as specified in a YAML file.

If you want to create a directory structure that looks like this:

Example
+-scenario1/
  +-base/
  | +-src/
  | +-bin/
  +-source1/
  | +-src/
  | +-bin/
  +-target1/
  | +-src/
  | +-bin/
  +-config1/
    +-source1/
    | +-astdiff/
    | +-dotfiles/
    +-target1/
      +-astdiff/
      +-dotfiles/

You are going to need to create a YAML file that specifies that structure, similar to this:

---
DirectoryStructure:
- base: "$DEVALSUB"
  structure:
  - name: "Example"
    subs:
    - name: "scenario1"
      subs:
      - name: "base"
        subs:
        - name: "src"
        - name: "bin"
      - name: "source1"
        subs:
        - name: "src"
        - name: "bin"
      - name: "target1"
        subs:
        - name: "src"
        - name: "bin"
      - name: "config1"
        subs:
        - name: "source1"
          subs:
          - name: "astdiff"
          - name: "dotfiles"
        - name: "target1"
          subs:
          - name: "astdiff"
          - name: "dotfiles"
...

The base key is associated with the directory that this directory structure should be based in. The structure key is associated with a nested list that represents the directory structure to be created.

Though this configuration file may seem a bit verbose, it can easily be copied and reused because the directory structure for most examples is almost identical. For instance, to create one for Example2, I simple copy the YAML file and replace - name: "Example" with - name: "Example2".

To run the script and generate the directory structure:

python dirify.py exampleconfig.yaml