Herodotus: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 17:08, 5 October 2018

It's a work in progress.

(Inspired by, and partly based in the implementation, on herodotos tool. Note the different spelling of the name of this tool and of our project. Named after Herodotus.)

Which computed or external meta-information for a package is tracked

Analytic facts (computed from the "internal" content of package releases):

coccinelle static analysis of the C code (warnings).
cppcheck static analysis of the C/C++ code (warnings).
...

Synthetic facts (added "externally" by maintainers)

Resolutions for the warnings from the static analysis (a reason why they are invalid or a fix).
...

Representation

Each fact is linked to the corresponding Git (Gear) commit or tag.
The facts can be stored in the same Git repository in a separate branch.
If the "same" fact appears for several releases, all its occurrences are linked together, so that a maintainer can view them as a single fact. Only when the facts change between releases, it should need attention.

User interfaces

Files (obtained via Git), org-mode editor (Emacs; org-mode is like a personal wiki)
...

Implementation details

The core: herodotos tool

herodotos tool runs the analyzers for different releases and then links identical facts (modulo the diff, i.e., the changes of the source code).

Description of herodotos tool

http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/papers/aosd10.pdf
https://kernelnewbies.org/NicolasPalix (its developer; this page has a short description of the tool)

coccinelle support

coccinelle is natively supported by herodotos tool.

Actually, herodotos tool can work with any analyzer which gives output in the org-mode format.

cppcheck support

cppcheck is supported by flycheck (an Emacs package)
flycheck can be hacked to output the information in the format suitable for herodotos tool (org-mode)

So, we could easily get the support for any analyzer known to flycheck.

@@ Line 14: / Line 14: @@
 ::* ...
 ;Representation:
-:* Each fact is linked to the corresponding Git (Gear) commit or tag, and can be stored in the same Git repository in a separate branch.
+:* Each fact is linked to the corresponding Git (Gear) commit or tag.
+:* The facts can be stored in the same Git repository in a separate branch.
 :* If the "same" fact appears for several releases, all its occurrences are linked together, so that a maintainer can view them as a single fact. Only when the facts change between releases, it should need attention.
 ;User interfaces: