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More tinderboxing, more analysis, more disk space

Even though I had a cold I’ve kept busy in the past few days, which was especially good because today was most certainly Monday. For the sake of mental sanity, I’ve decided a few months ago that the weekend is off work for me, and Monday is dedicated at summing up what I’m going to do during the rest of the week, sort of a planning day. Which usually turns out to mean a lot of reading and very little action and writing.

Since I cannot sleep right now (I’ll have to write a bit about that too), I decided to start with the writing to make sure the plans I figured out will be enacted this week. Whih is especially considerate to do considering I also had to spend some time labelling, as usual this time of the year. Yes I’m still doing that, at least until I can get a decent stable job. It works and helps paying the bills at least a bit.

So anyway, you might have read Serkan’s post regarding the java-dep-check package and the issus that it found once run on the tinderbox packages. This is probably one of the most interesting uses of the tinderbox: large-scale testing of packages that would otherwise keep such a low profile that they would never come out. To make more of a point, the tinderbox is now running with the JAVA_PKG_STRICT variable set so that the Java packages will have extra checks and would be much more safely tested on the tree.

I also wanted to add further checks for bashisms in the configure script. This sprouted from the fact that, on FreeBSD 7.0, the autoconf-generated configure script does not discard the /bin/sh shell any longer. Previously, the FreeBSD implementation was discarded because of a bug, and thus the script re-executed itself using bash instead. This was bad (because bash, as we should really well know, is slow) but also good (because then all the scripts were executed with the same shell on both Linux and FreeBSD). Since the bug is now fixed, the original shell is used, which is faster (and thus good); the problem is that some projects (unieject included!) use bashisms that will fail. Javier spent some time trying to debug the issue.

To check for bashisms, I’ve used the script that Debian makes available. Unfortunately the script is far from perfect. First of all it does not really have an easy way to just scan a subtree for actual sh scripts (using egrep is not totally fie since autoconf m4 fragments often have the #!/bin/sh string in them). Which forced me to write a stupid, long and quite faulty script to scan the configure files.

But even worse, the script is full of false positives: instead of actually parsing its semantics, it only scans for substrings. For instance it identified the strange help output in gnumeric as a bash-specific brace expansion, when it was in an HEREDOC string. Instead of this method, I’d probably take a special parameter in bash that tells the interpreter to output warnings about bash-specific features, maybe I should write it myself.

But I think that there are some things that should be addressed in a much different way than the tinderbox itself. Like I have written before, there are many tests that should actually be executed on source code, like static analysis of the source code, and analysis of configure scripts so to fix issues like canonical targets when they are not needed, or misaligned ./configure --help output, and os on so forth. This kind of scans should not be applied only to released code, but more importantly on the code still in the repositories, so that the issues can be killed before the released code.

I had this idea when I went to look for different conditions on Lennart’s repositories (which are as usually available on my own repositories with changes and fixes and improvements on the buildsystem – a huge thanks to Lennart for allowing me to be his autotools-meister). By build-checking his repositories before he makes release I can ensure the released code works for Gentoo just fine, instead of having to patch it afterwards and queue the patch for the following release. It’s the step beyond upstreaming the patches.

Unfortunately this kind of work is not only difficult because it’s hard to write static analysis software that gets good results; US DHS-founded Coverity Scan, although lauded by people like Andrew Morton, had tremendously bad results in my opinion with xine-lib analysis: lots of issues were never reported, and the ones reported were often enough either false positives or were inside the FFmpeg code (which xine-lib used to import); and the code was almost never updated. If it didn’t pick up the change to the Mercurial repository, that would have been understandable, I don’t pretend them to follow the repository moves of all the projects they analyse, but the problem was there since way before the move. And it also reported every and each day the same exact problems, repeated over and over; for a while I tried to keep track of them and marked hte ones we already dealt with or which were false positives or were parts of FFmpeg (which may even have been fixed already).

So one thing to address is to have an easy way to keep track of various repositories and their branches, which is not so easy since all SCM programs have different ways to access the data. Ohloh Open Hub has probably lots of experience with that, so I guess that might be a start; it has to be considered, though, that Open Hub only supports the three “major” SCM products, GIT, Subversion and the good old CVS, which means that extending it to any repository at all is going to take a lot more work, and it had quite a bit of problems with accessing Gentoo repositories which means that it’s certainly not fault-proof. And even if I was able to hook up a similar interface on my system. it would probably require much more disk space that I’m able to have right now.

For sure now the first step is to actually write the analysis script that first checks the build logs (since anyway that would already allow to have some results, once hooked up with the tinderbox), and then find a way to identify some of the problems we most care about in Gentoo from static analysis of the source code. Not an easy task or something that can be done in spare time so if you got something to contribute, please do, it would be really nice to get the pieces of the puzzle up.

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