Describing a new project

content/projects/rubidium.md

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++++
+title = "Thrifty Rubidium"
+date = 2022-06-14
+
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["projects", "personal", "make", "runner"]
++++
+
+Task Runner.
+
+The basic idea is to have a bunch of tasks, and each task have a step. Based on
+the parallelism available (number of cores, for example), the system would
+launch each step on each task as long as there is available processing power.
+
+Let's start with the definition of task: A task could be, very simply, a
+directory with a runner configuration file, where the steps are defined. For
+example:
+
+```json
+{
+	"name": "ExampleTask",
+	"steps": [
+		{
+			"name": "Get List",
+			"command": "ls > file.ls"
+		},
+		{
+			"name": "Find file",
+			"command": "grep somename file.ls"
+		},
+		{
+			"name": "Remove file",
+			"command": "rm file.ls"
+		}
+	]
+}
+```
+
+If one of the steps fails, the whole task stops. For example, if grep returns
+an error code, "Rmeove file" would not be run.
+
+{% note() %}
+**Thought**: Maybe we could add a flag on each step to point that the steps
+should keep going even in case of error.
+{% end %}
+
+The first step is to walk all directories, trying to find out which ones
+contain the task configuration file. Once found, it will be added to the list
+of running tasks, and the steps will start running.
+
+One multiple tasks we could have something like this
+([TUI](https://github.com/fdehau/tui-rs) idea, also):
+
+```
+Task         Step 1        Step 2         Step 3           Step 4
+ExampleTask  Get list (R)  Find file (W)  Remove file (W)
+Task2        Step21 (D)    Step 22 (R)    Step 23 (W)      Step 24 (W)
+Task3        Step31 (R)    Step 32 (W)    Step 33 (W)
+Task4        Step41 (D)    Step 42 (R)
+Task5        Step51 (E)    Step 52 (S)    Step 53 (S)
+```
+
+In this example, there are 4 available cores, so only 4 steps can run at the
+same time; those are marked as `(R)` for Running. Once the step is Done, marked
+as `(D)`, task can move to the next step. Steps marked with `(W)` are Waiting
+for their time to be run, which requires the previous step to be marked as Done
+and having enough cores available. If a step errors, `(E)`, the task stops
+running and the next steps are marked as Skipped, `(S)`.
+
+The structures to load the tasks is pretty simple:
+
+```rust
+pub struct Case {
+	name: String,
+	steps: Vec<Step>
+}
+
+pub struct Step {
+	name: String,
+	command: String,
+}
+```
+
+After reading the data from the disk, the code could check if the step is "valid", 
+like checking if the command exists and can be called.