[cs615asa] About HW3

[Jan Schaumann]

byu1 <byu1 at stevens.edu> wrote:

> I want to use Ruby as main programming language to implement hw3. And I  
> found Amazon provides some useful RubySDK for developers to build AWS  
> applications. In order to use these RubySDK, i have to install some gems  
> (ruby libraries) under Linux-Lab. But users don't need to install them  
> by manual because I will write ruby program to automate the whole  
> installation process.
>
> That is my idea for the hw3. Does it OK?

If your tool provides or installs the required modules itself at runtime
and handles all the various edge cases resulting from this action well,
then that would be ok.  Please note that you must not rely on superuser
privileges and installation would have to happen within the user's
environment with the user's preferences and environment settings being
applicable, so I would probably not recommend going down this road.

The assignment can be done without any add-on modules, and to some
degree that is also the point: you need to be able to write tools that
interface with other tools in arbitrary ways.

So, yes, you can attempt the approach you suggested, but if your tool
fails in setting up the required modules and as a result doesn't work,
then you will lose a significant amount of points.

-Jan