On Oct 2, 3:28 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Hi, > > I'm currently writing an animation pipeline in Python which is a > system for controlling the flow of work and assets for a team of > people working on a computer animated film. The system will be fairly > large with a database backend. > > One particular problem that I'd like to address is the need for > managing dependent tasks. Often you need to process one particular set > of information before starting on another so when you batch them all > together and send them off to a set of computers to process you need > some way of formulating the dependencies. This preferably ends up > looking a lot like a Makefile in the end with syntax a bit like: > > task task_name (dependencies): > commands to complete the task > ... > > Where the dependencies are a list of other tasks that need to be > completed first. > > However I'd really like to do it in Python, but I'm thinking I'd might > need to extend Python a bit in order to achieve the new syntax. I've > seen attempts to do this within the Python syntax (Scons and buildIt) > and I'm not a big fan of the way it ends up looking. I've worked at a > place that has written it's own language to handle that sort of thing > but then you end up with a language that is good for that but rubbish > at everything else. Python seems like a good basis if I could tweak it > slightly. > > One particular point that interests me is the idea of maintaining > compatibility with Python modules so you still have all the > functionality. This makes me think of the "from __future__ import ..." > statements which, if I understand them correctly, can introduce new > syntax like the with_statement, whilst still maintaining compatibility > with older modules? > > Is this correct? Can anyone write a syntax changing module or is > __future__ a hard coded special case? I realise I'll have to get into > the C side of things for this. Are there other approaches to this that > I really should be considering instead? > > Any thoughts would be most appreciated, though I would like to stress > that I don't think Python should support the syntax I'm proposing I'd > just like to know if I can extend a copy of it to do that. > > Mike
You could use a professional Job scheduling system such as LSF or Suns Grid Engine that both support job dependencies (and a whole lot more). For example, search for 'Job Dependencies' on this page: http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/820-0699/6nce0ht7s?a=view - Paddy. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list