[pacman-dev] Namcap 2.8 release and future plans

[Rémy Oudompheng]

Hello,

I would like to release namcap 2.8 : it contains several new rules, and
several bug fixes.
* the git repo : http://projects.archlinux.org/users/remy/namcap.git/
* the source tarball : http://dev.archlinux.org/~remy/namcap-2.8.tar.gz
* the package : http://dev.archlinux.org/~remy/namcap-2.8-1-any.pkg.tar.xz

A notable addition here is the appearance of a test suite.
Feel free to make any comments.

I don't think I'll do many fixes on the 2.x branch.

My plans for namcap 3 :

* use Python 3
* parse split packages : PKGBUILDs are parsed in a "pkginfo" structure,
  I'd like to parse split packages into a tuple
    (pkgbase, list of pkginfo's),
  does this look ok to you ?
* use a class hierarchy for rules :
    AbstractRule : defines very basic functions (get_name, get_description)
    PkgBuildRule, PkgInfoRule, TarballRule : derived classes applying
      to a PKGBUILD, to only one package in a split PKGBUILD, to a
      tarball
  this allows putting many rules in a single file and loading them using
  calls to isinstance() or issubclass() functions.
* optionally : implement dan's idea of turning rules into callbacks.
  I have doubts about the benefit of such a transformation, but several
  of our tarballs are quite big and such an optimisation would be
  valuable.

Such a callback would be implemented in the following way : define an
generator/coroutine that yields files in a tarball (it would be useful
to read raw tar.xz tarballs, for example by reading the pipe out of an xz
process).

Then the main loop of namcap iterates over this generator and feeds files
to all relevant rules (TarballRule calass), which should implement a
method called e.g. read_file().

The rules should gather information about the tarball in one pass.

Then call some method called post_process? analyze? finalize? for all
these rules: in this method, the rules use all the gathered information,
e.g. the output of readelf -d, to compute the result and return it.

-- 
Rémy.