Creating templates to ignore sections of code

[shreykshah]

Is it possible to mark certain lines as a template such that sections of code are ignored? For example, if I have handed students some starter code to work with and asked them to modify small sections, the software similarity will come back as extremely high. I am trying to ensure the starter code is ignored.

[rien]

This is indeed something we want to support, this was working at one point but seems to be broken currently (#1163).

If you're using the CLI, you can experiment with using the -m or -M flags: this allows you to ignore the most common fingerprints in the dataset you're analyzing (see dolos --help for more info). But this does currently seem to have a bug.

We're planning on reworking this feature and integrating this in our front-end in the coming months however, so if you're using the web application, you will need to exercise some patience.

[shreykshah]

The -m or -M flags are not necessarily robust, where we have to guess what the best values for these flags would be given our template. Are there any plans for explicit template support?

[rien]

Yes, template support will be a port of this rework, as well as integrating this in the web application.

[shreykshah]

I plan on using the CLI. Would there be any way to approximate this for a two student course in the meantime (perhaps submitting the template as a third student and setting -M 1)?

[rien]

We have added experimental support for ignoring template code and frequent fingerprints in PR #1524