Add options to directly supply text for various variables

Hi,

Thanks for working on irace. I appreciate any help I can get in developing irace and there are long-standing issues whose resolution would greatly benefit thousands of users (#18, #43). However, I'm hesitant to merge this code in particular because it adds a lot of new code and lots of new options but I don't see how it helps with making irace "file-independent".

The suggestion in #34 was to "define a JSON format and pass all the setup as a single input string in stdin so one can do cat conf.json | irace --stdin". This would mean a single new option.

Maybe I don't understand what you are trying to achieve. If the goal is to implement something quickly that works for your own usecase, that is OK, but then it may be better to create a fork, use it in practice, develop the idea for a while, polish the code, see if other people find it useful and if you yourself are planning to keep maintaining the code and using it after some time.

Note that it is already possible to use irace without using any files, just not from the command-line (I'm not sure if calling irace from the command-line is what you actually want to do). See the example here: https://mlopez-ibanez.github.io/irace/reference/irace-package.html

Best wishes

MLopez-Ibanez / irace

Add options to directly supply text for various variables #54