Design recovery and maintenance of build systems

Abstract

The build system forms an indispensable part of any software project. It needs to evolve in parallel with the source code in order to build, test and install the software. Unfortunately, little tool support exists to help maintainers gain insight into the build system, much less to refactor it. In this paper, we therefore present the design and implementation of a re(verse)-engineering framework for build systems named MAKAO. At its heart the framework makes the build's dependency graph available in a tangible way. Aside from visualisation, this enables powerful querying of all build-related data, as well as various filtering techniques to define views on the build architecture. If desired, all this gathered information can be put to use to write aspects for refactoring the build. Afterwards, validation rules can help in assessing failure or success. We applied our implementation on an industrial C system and the Linux 2.6.16.18 kernel, with good results.