distrst — Automatically distribute an rst run across course-specfied servers.
Version 1:
distrst {assignment} [[ p | f | t ] | c ] {suite} {'studentglob'} {run_id} [logdir]
Version 2:
distrst [options] {assignment} {suite} {run_id}
Most of the parameters are as in rst.
The logdir parameter is a directory which
log files can be written to, which track the progress of
rst runs on each server. If no directory is
specified, logging will not be performed.
If version 2 is being used, this can be specified with the
-o option.
The program distrst is a wrapper that distributes
rst runs across the servers named in the
test_servers list in .rstrc,
automatically balancing load and notably
speeding up the time it takes to do testing runs. While
rst is often more convenient when testing a
suite on one or two students, distrst is preferable
for doing a test run on a large number of students.
Because interleaved output to the terminal from all of the servers
would be useless, distrst only prints basic diagnostic
information about the servers it's connecting to and which students are being
run on each. To allow for more information, an extra parameter for a
logging directory is provided. If it is used, the output from rst
runs will be put in server-specific log files within that directory;
these files are named
{assignment}{type}.{suite}.{runid}.{testrunnername}