Motivation for Vesta-lite

There is at least conjecture that vesta has too much of a ramp for new users. The worst case tradeoff between

  how much i get out of vesta
--------------------------------
how long it takes to learn vesta

would be for a single developer working on his project. (The best is for a large group (100+) of developers)

This page attempts to list the things which could be made simpler so that a single developer working on a single project can get benefit out of vesta with minimal investment.

Simplifications

Not learning SDL

This is a tough one. Much of the power, but especially flexibility, comes with the ability to script the build.

SDL, being a pure functional language, is part of the vesta guarantee of reproducibility.

Speculating idealisitcally, if one would write in perl, or python, or tcl or some other language a that a large majority of prospective vesta users _already know_, it would be a huge help. Not sure how/if we could do this.

Yet, at intel, few users write SDL, so maybe there's hope.

Name Cache, or hierarchy simplification

At intel we use a "name cache" which lets the average user ignore the relatively deep hierarchy of the repository.

Why? I assume it makes it easier.

If so, can we make this public, and/or integrated, somehow?