Design recovery and maintenance of build systems

Adams, Bram; Tromp, Herman; Schutter, Kris De; Meuter, Wolfgang De

doi:10.1109/icsm.2007.4362624

Cited by 90 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…We began with the latest snapshot of the Linux kernel (v3. 19) and the most recent version of all GNU library projects updated within the past 5 years (since 2010) 1 . We chose these because they are among the most advanced users of GNU Make [10].…”

Section: A Subject Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Make It Simple - An Empirical Analysis of GNU Make Feature Use in Open Source Projects

Martin¹,

Cordy²,

Adams³

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension

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Abstract-Make is one of the oldest build technologies and is still widely used today, whether by manually writing Makefiles, or by generating them using tools like Autotools and CMake. Despite its conceptual simplicity, modern Make implementations such as GNU Make have become very complex languages, featuring functions, macros, lazy variable assignments and (in GNU Make 4.0) the Guile embedded scripting language. Since we are interested in understanding how widespread such complex language features are, this paper studies the use of Make features in almost 20,000 Makefiles, comprised of over 8.4 million lines, from more than 350 different open source projects. We look at the popularity of features and the difference between hand-written Makefiles and those generated using various tools. We find that generated Makefiles use only a core set of features and that more advanced features (such as function calls) are used very little, and almost exclusively in hand-written Makefiles.

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Section: A Subject Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Make It Simple - An Empirical Analysis of GNU Make Feature Use in Open Source Projects

Martin¹,

Cordy²,

Adams³

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Program Comprehension

Self Cite

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“…Their framework Makao [1] infers modularity in KBUILD by analyzing build traces. However, the amount of variation points that we identify in KBUILD with this article indicates that the full re-engineering of build-system variability remains an unsolved problem.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This subsection analyzes the mechanics of KBUILD and identifies the challenges for an automated extraction of variability. 1 Variability Management in Operating Systems …”

Section: Variability In Linuxmentioning

confidence: 99%

A robust approach for variability extraction from the Linux build system

Dietrich

Tartler

Schröder-Preikschat

et al. 2012

Proceedings of the 16th International Software Product Line Conference - Volume 1

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With more than 11,000 optional and alternative features, the Linux kernel is a highly configurable piece of software. Linux is generally perceived as a textbook example for preprocessor-based product derivation, but more than 65 percent of all features are actually handled by the build system. Hence, variability-aware static analysis tools have to take the build system into account.However, extracting variability information from the build system is difficult due to the declarative and turing-complete MAKE language. Existing approaches based on text processing do not cover this challenges and tend to be tailored to a specific Linux version and architecture. This renders them practically unusable as a basis for variability-aware tool support -Linux is a moving target! We describe a robust approach for extracting implementation variability from the Linux build system. Instead of extracting the variability information by a text-based analysis of all build scripts, our approach exploits the build system itself to produce this information. As our results show, our approach is robust and works for all versions and architectures from the (git-)history of Linux.

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“…Adams developed visualization and refactoring tools for Make-based build systems [21] that integrated aspect-oriented programming, a multilanguage technique, into legacy C software. His case studies contained deep analyses of Make build systems including Quake and the Linux kernel [22].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Build system issues in multilanguage software

Neitsch

Wong

Godfrey

2012

2012 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM)

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Abstract-Building software from source is often viewed as a "solved problem" by software engineers, as there are many mature, well-known tools and techniques. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that these tools often do not effectively address the complexities of building multilanguage software. To investigate this apparent problem, we have performed a qualitative study on a set of five multilanguage open source software packages. Surprisingly, we found build system problems that prevented us from building many of these packages out-of-thebox. Our key finding is that there are commonalities among build problems that can be systematically addressed. In this paper, we describe the results of this exploratory study, identify a set of common build patterns and anti-patterns, and outline research directions for improving the build process. One such finding is that multilanguage packages avoid certain build problems by supporting compilation-free extension. As well, we find evidence that concerns from the application and implementation domains may "leak" into the build model, with both positive and negative effects on the resulting build systems.

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Design recovery and maintenance of build systems

Abstract: The build systemforms an indispensable part ofany software project. It needs to evolve in parallel with the source

Cited by 90 publications

References 24 publications

Make It Simple - An Empirical Analysis of GNU Make Feature Use in Open Source Projects

Make It Simple - An Empirical Analysis of GNU Make Feature Use in Open Source Projects

A robust approach for variability extraction from the Linux build system

Build system issues in multilanguage software

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