Pipeline interfaces should be well specified

[tomjaguarpaw]

We have a pipeline that looks a bit like this

• CMake
  • accepts a complicated family of options
  • builds some dependencies
  • creates a build.ninja file to tell ninja how to build the tools
• ninja
  • builds binaries of tools
  • puts them somewhere
• run-all.ps1
  • runs the tools to calculate benchmarks
  • the timing information is written to specially-named files
• plot_graphs.py
  • looks for the specially-named timing files
  • generates graphs
  • puts the graphs somewhere

It would be great to have a specification of each step of the pipeline. What are the arguments it accepts? Where does it have to be run?[1] What are its outputs? Where are files placed and what is their specification?

[1] Ideally any tool should be able to be run in any directory. It shouldn't decide where to read or write files based on its current working directory.

[tomjaguarpaw]

• CMake: https://github.com/awf/ADBench/blob/master/docs/BuildAndTest.md
• run-all.ps1: https://github.com/awf/ADBench/blob/master/docs/GlobalRunner.md
• plot-graphs.py: https://github.com/awf/ADBench/blob/master/docs/PlotCreating.md

This covers most of my request. I'm leaving this issue open so I can go through later in finer detail to check that everything is covered.