[Daca-general] scan-build and metrics gsoc proposals and DACA

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 06:46:38PM +0100, Raphael Geissert wrote:
> While going through the list of gsoc proposals I found two that are 
> basically related to my idea of DACA.

Hi Raphael et al., thanks for getting in touch: in fact, I wanted to get
in touch with DACA people myself, so thanks for anticipating me :)

There is one piece of the puzzle missing, which I've discussed with
Sylvestre. At IRILL (http://www.irill.org) I work closely with
Coccinelle authors (http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/) and we are going to have
a student working this "summer" (May->July) on periodic Coccinelle runs
on all the C code found in Debian.

That's our main interest, but I'm myself interested in having something
more organic to easily plug in other static analysis tool. Hence DACA
comes to mind. We are quite flexible, we can go from a minimal setup
where we only run Coccinelle on a local source mirror, but I would very
much prefer proper integration in a more suitable framework. In addition
to that, we are also going to need a sort of source.debian.org service,
that does syntax highlighting for multiple languages, to be used as a
cross-reference service to pinpoint errors to specific lines of code. I
hope to keep this as a separate piece of the puzzle, and to offer an API
that would allow to attach "pop-up" messages via some Javascript
hackery. We also aim to produce output compatible with firehose
(https://github.com/fedora-static-analysis/firehose), but that too is
just a small piece of the puzzle.

The most important part is clearly the infrastructure. We're considering
DACA and I've looked at the list archives just a few days ago. Honestly,
it didn't seem to me that DACA was much alive, but I wanted to check
with you. At this point in time, do you still consider DACA architecture
the right one and worth to be invested upon? Or do you rather think
something else should be designed at this point?

In the former case, we'll be happy to direct our efforts toward DACA
integration. We also have quite some computing power to offer, in case
that's welcome to run DACA jobs. For context reasons we need to develop
in Python, but gearman-Python integration doesn't seem to be a problem
(I'm no gearmen's expert, but that's what a quick search reveals).

Regarding my metrics proposal, that's something I'd like to keep
separate, as I'd hope it could be use to graph much more than "only"
statistics gathered from static analysis.

What do you think?
Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  zack at upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
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