Nathan's Question on Changing Workflow Structure

[Jonathan Clark]

Also: How do I change the workflow structure while it is running? Will
it reanalyze the .tape file before starting each task?

What if I decide to kill a task prematurely, because the output is
"good enough"? If I kill the job in the scheduler it looks like that
counts as a task failure—is there a way around this?

REPLY:

On changing the workflow structure: Ducttape is designed to all this,
but with the current implementation, there are a few caveats -- for
example, ducttape won't go back and modify your old directory
structure if you change a task name, etc.

Ducttape will *not* reanalyze the tape file before running each task.
It reads the tape file only when you first invoke it. If you want to
run other tasks, you'll need to invoke ducttape again. You can use
multiple plans if you want different invocations of ducttape to work
on different experimental setups. There's an experimental locking
mechanism that's in the current version that will allow multiple
ducttape processes to work on the same directory tree. It's almost
ready for prime time, but still has a few loose ends I need to tie up.

It you kill a task prematurely, then you should 1) first make sure you
left everything in a sane state and 2) then use the "mark_done" mode
of ducttape to force ducttape to consider that task complete. Usage:
ducttape experiments.tape mark_done task_name realization_name 3)
Re-run your workflow (which probably died when you killed the task) --
it should recognize that task as complete.