On the design of the amoeba configuration manager

Abstract

The program Amoeba Make, or Amake, is being designed to fulfil the need of a make-like configuration manager capable of exploiting the potentials of the Amoeba distributed operating system. The major design goal is to create a software configuration manager that is both easy to use and efficient. The specification and maintenance of a large configuration should be easy, and should be automated as much as possible. Furthermore, the build process should exploit Amoeba's capabilities and resources when creating or updating a target. In this paper we show how a smart file server can contribute to Amake's efficiency. We also show how a declarative configuration description allows Amake to take full advantage of parallelism and to determine the commands needed for building and maintaining targets.