The new cmsMake!

There are may ways to install task-maker on your system, you can compile it yourself (instructions below) or, if you are on Ubuntu or Archlinux, there are easier methods.

If you are using Arch Linux you may want to install task-maker from the AUR: task-maker or task-maker-git.

At releases you can find prebuilt .deb files. To install them you can issue: sudo dpkg -i that_file.deb and then sudo apt --fix-broken install.

After installing task-maker, run task-maker in the task folder to compile and run everything. Specifying no option all the caches are active, the next executions will be very fast, actually doing only what's needed.

If you really want to repeat the execution of something provide the --cache option:

task-maker --cache=nothing

Possible values of --cache are: all, reevaluate (do not regenerate inputs/outputs if not needed), nothing (disable all the cache).

Sometimes you only want to test only some solutions, speeding up the compilation and cleaning a bit the output:

task-maker sol1.cpp sol2.py

Note that you may or may not specify the folder of the solution (sol/ or solution/). You can also specify only the prefix of the name of the solutions you want to check.

By default the task in the current directory is executed, if you want to change the task without cd-ing away:

task-maker --task-dir ~/tasks/poldo

All the compiled files are kept in an internal folder but if you want to use them, for example to debug a solution, passing --copy-exe all the useful files are copied to the bin/ folder inside the task directory.

task-maker --copy-exe

Before a contest it's good practise to check that your checker does not behave weirdly with malformed outputs from the contestants. task-maker provides a simple fuzzer using radamsa (which has to be installed where the workers are running). It takes an input file and the corresponding output file and will try to mutate the output file in order to crash the checker. Note that task-maker cannot determine if the checker behave correctly (i.e. gives the correct score), it only checks if the checker crashes or not, and if it prints a valid score (from 0.0 to 1.0).

The results are stored in fuzz_checker_task_name in the current working directory. Remember to clean it before each run!

task-maker --fuzz-checker in_file out_file

If you want to clean everything, for example after the contest, simply run:

task-maker --clean

You may want to build all the tasks of a contest, to do so just issue contest-maker in the contest directory. You can also specify --contest-dir to build all the tasks inside that folder or you can select a specific contest.yaml file with --contest-yaml.

One of the best feature of task-maker is the ability to execute a task remotely. The setup is really simple, you need to start some programs: a server and a group of workers. The server will accept connection from workers and clients, a worker is the program that executes a command, a client is you!

First start a server:

task-maker --run-server --server-address=0.0.0.0

Then start a worker in each machine, specifying the server to connect to:

task-maker --run-worker --worker-address=<ip of the server>

To run the execution remotely just pass:

task-maker --server server_ip:7070

Note that the TCP port 7070 is used, the connection has to be available, stable and reliable. A local network is suggested but it should work also via the Internet.

If something went wrong and you want to kill task-maker you have also to kill the background processes that may have been spawned. You may find the pid of those processes looking at /tmp/task-maker-*-*.pid

If you want to compile tak-maker yourself you need the following dependencies:

g++ make cmake

You also need a compiler capable of compiling C++14.

To start the compilation simply run:

mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake ..
make

This will pull all the dependencies and compile everything. If you want to speedup the compilation you may want to add -j X (with X the number of cores) to make.

If you want to enable the optimization remember to put -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release to the cmake command.

Note that the build system uses Hunter for managing the dependencies, in some cases you may find a new directory in your home called .hunter, to prevent this you can add -DHUNTER_ROOT=/some/path to the cmake command.

Once the build finish you may want to install it, in build/python you will find a Python3 package. Create a virtualenv with python3 as default version (virtualenv -p python3 /path), install the python dependencies using pip -r requirements.txt and then install task-maker with ./setup.py install.

We support build without Hunter (ie using system packages) only on Arch Linux, there are some dependencies to be installed:

• core/elfutils
• extra/cmake
• community/gmock
• community/gtest
• community/capnproto
• community/pybind11
• community/python-ruamel-yaml
• community/python-traits
• community/python-pytoml

To compile the project issue:

mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake .. -DHUNTER_ENABLED=OFF
make