Mellow Funks,

I hope to draw on your collective wisdom for guidance moreso than technical grit, please indulge me. I am a sysadmin/techsupport/handholder with a company that produces 2D and 3D animation/visualFX. As you might imagine one of the key process goals is to get work done faster. For me this means parallel processing for render jobs (for animators it means cracking the whip and making them stay late). But I digress.

Render Queueing Wishlist:

• Cross-platform , Linux,IRIX,Win32
• Templated, new task-types, their behaviour and interface can be modified by japh.
• Server-client , the p2p idea of smedge is OK, but try finding or watching a specific log/task - no thanks.
• implemented in perl.

I am confident that I could build the execution model (the one I have in mind) fairly quickly in perl, but as yet my skill in creating Tk interfaces is in a word - appaling. This is one reason for my interest in templating. I see no reason not to be able to describe a task by;

• The binary used to run it
• the source file to of interest
• directories/paths of interest
• ranges that can be parsed in to an arglist
• A lexicon of "progress" watching ;to determine from the binary's STDOUT where it is up to.
• A lexicon of "warning" watching ; determine if it is failing

Ideally these things could be packages/classes generated from a template

I am keen to learn how other monks have solved this flavor of problem, whether through purchasing software or by rolling your own. I have plied google and investigated a number of different industry-specific solutions like muster , smedge2 which have their own features and quirks, smedge2 is unattractive until it ports to linux at least. Muster is a bit too specific and pedantic. I'd love a perl solution, even more so one that I could develop myself (not necessarily TODAY, but as a long term goal). Where each of these programs has lost points is that if you want rendererX supported, you ask, and you wait. Yuck - a system of templates would be far more desirable/hackable.

many thanks -
toaster
I can't believe it's not psellchecked