Tips and Tricks for Waf¶

Here is a list of tips and tricks you might want to use for your research project. Some of the things are only suggestions to solve some problems, but are not further explained.

Compiling the reports with LaTeX¶

Compiling pollutes the command line interface. To shut it off, change prompt to 0 in src/paper/wscript. Unfortunately, if an error happens, you have to switch back to find the source.
(Windows) Sometimes changes in the dependencies of the report are not recognized and the document is not compiled. Maybe this is related to a similar issue with LatexTools. In this case, type rm bld/src/paper to delete all built artifacts.

Copying files¶

Do not use the rule argument with cp or copy as those operations tend out to be extremely slow. Use one of the following instead.

To copy a file from the source to the build directory, use

ctx(
    features="subst",
    source=ctx.path_to(ctx, "IN_DATA", "file.pkl"),
    target=ctx.path_to(ctx, "OUT_DATA", "file.pkl"),
    is_copy=True,
)

To copy a directory use buildcopy (Link)

Running interactive commands¶

Apparently, this should be possible with this. Should test it with the debug script.

Type annotations with Monkeytype¶

MonkeyType allows you to collect information on variable types at runtime and store the results in a SQLite database. After that, you are able apply the type annotations to your code.

For that, we need to replace plain Python as the executor of the scripts with MonkeyType in run_py_script.py. Of course, it is possible to create another runner named run_monkeytype_script.py, but it would be more tiresome. Instead locate the variable run_str in class run_py_script() and replace ${PYCMD} with monkeytype run.

Running Waf will execute all scripts with MonkeyType and store the results in bld/monkeytype.sqlite3. Use monkeytype apply some.module to apply the type annotations to the module.

Maybe the procedure messes with your prepended arguments, but I have not used them so far. Feedback welcome!