Automatic conversion of the NetBSD pkgsrc CVS module, use with care
6c727a4354
The Linux operating system (OS) is evolving rapidly to improve performance and to provide new features. This evolution, however, makes it difficult to maintain platform-specific code such as device drivers. Indeed, an evolution in a driver support library often triggers the need for multiple collateral evolutions in dependent device drivers, to bring the drivers up to date with the new library API. Currently, collateral evolutions are mostly done manually. The large number of drivers, however, implies that this approach is time-consuming and unreliable, leading to subtle errors when modifications are not done consistently. Moreover, as these collateral evolutions are often poorly documented, the resulting maintenance is difficult and costly, frequently introducing errors. If a driver maintainer becomes unavailable, the driver quickly falls behind the rest of the OS. In this project, we propose a language-based approach to address the problem of collateral evolution in drivers. Specifically, we are developing the development environment, Coccinelle, that provides a transformation language for precisely expressing collateral evolutions and an interactive transformation tool for applying them. The key idea of Coccinelle is to shift the burden of collateral evolution from the driver maintainer to the OS developer who performs the original OS evolution, and who thus understands this evolution best. In our vision, the OS developer first uses the Coccinelle transformation language to write a semantic patch describing the required collateral evolution in device drivers and then uses the Coccinelle transformation tool to validate the semantic patch on the drivers in the Linux source distribution. When he has confidence in the correctness of the semantic patch, he distributes it for use by the maintainers of other drivers. Overall, Coccinelle will provide a means for formally documenting collateral evolutions and for easing the application of these evolutions to driver code. |
||
|---|---|---|
| archivers | ||
| audio | ||
| benchmarks | ||
| biology | ||
| bootstrap | ||
| cad | ||
| chat | ||
| comms | ||
| converters | ||
| cross | ||
| databases | ||
| devel | ||
| distfiles | ||
| doc | ||
| editors | ||
| emulators | ||
| filesystems | ||
| finance | ||
| fonts | ||
| games | ||
| geography | ||
| graphics | ||
| ham | ||
| inputmethod | ||
| lang | ||
| licenses | ||
| math | ||
| mbone | ||
| meta-pkgs | ||
| misc | ||
| mk | ||
| multimedia | ||
| net | ||
| news | ||
| packages | ||
| parallel | ||
| pkgtools | ||
| regress | ||
| security | ||
| shells | ||
| sysutils | ||
| templates | ||
| textproc | ||
| time | ||
| wm | ||
| www | ||
| x11 | ||
| Makefile | ||
| pkglocate | ||
| README | ||
$NetBSD: README,v 1.18 2005/05/07 22:18:28 wiz Exp $ Please see doc/pkgsrc.txt for information.