Detecting semantic changes in Makefile build code

Abstract

Build code in a Makefile represents the build rules with the dependencies among the files, and how they must be built together to produce a software system. As software evolves, its build code evolves as well to accommodate necessary changes in the build process. As part of software maintenance, it is crucial to understand how the build code is changed (e.g. changes in build rules or dependencies), and to verify and validate the correctness of the build process with different build configurations. Due to Make's dynamic nature, understanding and managing the changes to Makefiles is not trivial. In this paper, we introduce a set of semantic changes to build code in Makefiles. We also develop MkDiff, a tool to detect the changes to a Makefile at the semantic level. MkDiff uses symbolic dependency graphs (SDG) to find all possible concrete rules from a Makefile, and the dependencies among them. For two SDGs built from a Makefile at two versions, it first detects changed and unchanged nodes via its SDG matching algorithm. Then, from those results, it derives the semantic changes to the Makefile. Our empirical evaluation for MkDiff showed that it can accurately detect semantic changes in Makefiles.