Industry "standard" nomenclature for environment configuration

[Fredrik Averpil]

Hi,

So I'm developing our next-gen cg production pipeline on top of stalker, which so far is going really well, and is scheduled to go live within a month or so.

I've come to a point where I need to store information about the current environment/configuration when saving e.g. a Maya scene or a Nuke script. This means I need to store information about e.g. Maya version, any plugin and its version etc. I do this in order to assure that the scene will later be opened with the very same environment configuration it was created with.

Now, to my question. After having attended SIGGRAPH this year I think the entity to store all of this data under should probably be called "Workspace", as it seems a lot of studios has adopted this name for this type of entity. Or have I confused this with something completely different?

I wouldn't want to implement a new entity and have the whole concept wrong regarding its naming ;)

Regards,

Fredrik

[Marcus Ottosson]

Welcome to the world of environment configuration, also known as package configuration and configuration management and possibly lots more. I doubt you’ll find any one standard, but Rez is one of the solutions and may help you realize the magnitude of the journey ahead of you.

• https://github.com/nerdvegas/rez/wiki

Similar solutions in neighboring fields include Docker, Chef, Puppet, Vagrant and a few others.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open-source_configuration_management_software

In a nutshell, you’re in for a ride. :)

​

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[Paul Molodowitch]

Frederik, I don't think there's an accepted industry standard for what your looking for.  Workspace would certainly work, though there's possibly some confusion with what maya calls the "workspace".  I'm sure there's potential problems of a similar magnitude with most other names you could come up with, though.

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[Tony Barbieri]

We use the term "Workspace" to describe an applications work area under an Entity like an Asset, Shot or Sequence.  An Entity may contain more than a single Workspace depending how many applications are used to work under a Step.  We use Shotgun so we've inherited some of their terminology.

An example of our Schema is: Sequence -> Shot -> Step -> Workspace -> Task

Steps are fixed general terms like: animation, compositing, modeling, shading, rigging, etc.  They are mostly used for organizing Tasks together into a group.

Not sure if this helps at all.

Best,

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Tony

[Marcus Ottosson]

There seems to be two topics going on at once here. @Fredrik, did you just want to know whether or not the name “workspace” was an appropriate name amongst the other names within your system? If so, then I would suggest instead looking towards the collection of names you have already established, and evaluate a name suited to the responsibilities of your particular object.

Such a name would then become part of your domain model.

• Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-driven_design

I don’t think any outside source could (or at least should) govern any one definition within a model, without also taking into account surrounding definitions. “Workspace” fits the model Tony describes, because other definitions in his system have been considered with it in mind, and that doesn’t mean it fits any other model in any circumstance. Correct me if I’m wrong here, Tony.

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[Tony Barbieri]

I don’t think any outside source could (or at least should) govern any one definition within a model, without also taking into account surrounding definitions. “Workspace” fits the model Tony describes, because other definitions in his system have been considered with it in mind, and that doesn’t mean it fits any other model in any circumstance. Correct me if I’m wrong here, Tony.

You are correct.  Workspace works for us because it doesn't conflict with any other definitions and defines a model that we didn't have a definition for previously but needed.  For us the term "Workspace" accurately describes the entity model it's meant to represent which is an area where work is to be performed by artists.

At Siggraph, R&H's definition of a Workspace seemed to be more like what we are using Step to define.  I believe their Workspace encapsulated multiple "App" models which appeared to be work areas.  So in their model they had Workspace -> App whereas we use Step -> Workspace.

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Tony

[Justin Israel]

I just call that entire bit the "environment". As in, "baking out the environment when sending the job to the render farm". That,  or "context".

"A shot can be run on the render farm under the same environment / context as it was submitted "

But yea, whatever doesn't conflict with your existing terminology.

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[Fredrik Averpil]

Thanks guys for your input.

Marcus, I was just interested to hear if the baked down environment/config was called the same thing over at your sites (such as most sites call a shot a 'shot').

Regards,

Fredrik

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[Marcus Ottosson]

Marcus, I was just interested to hear if the baked down environment/config was called the same thing over at your sites (such as most sites call a shot a ‘shot’).

Ah ok, sorry about that. I think I got confused by the amount of exposition to your question.

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