Please enlighten me as to the complexity of the task of
copying files to a directory, compiling, running some
tests which write results into a database, and redirecting
the output to /bin/mail. Or is there more to this than just
that?
I would also like to point out that while a UNIX-based
handin system is very convenient for UNIX users (when it doesn't
have the strange idiosyncrasies that the current one does,
anyway), a Web-based one is inconvenient for everyone.
I work in the UNIX-based environment, on the andrew servers,
and a web-based system implies that I have to either:
- Download the file and use a local web browser
- Fire up a web browser on the andrew account
neither of which is terribly convenient. So, for a course that
purports to get students used to working with UNIX tools, it
would make most sense to make the handin script a UNIX tool.
Really, it's not that hard to write a sensible command-line
or ncurses (or even X though I do not recommend this) based
interface.
If I might make a suggestion about such a system, perhaps a
CVS-based interface may be a good idea, example:
cvs add file1 file2 file3
[edit files...]
cvs commit
[edit files some more...]
cvs commit
cvs test # run tests on currently committed code and either outputs or emails the results