Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

Monday 23 April 2007

Chronicle Released

I've finished my OOPSLA reviews (modulo a few small updates to come). So I stole some time today to finally finish off the Chronicle release. I eventually decided to go with mostly GPL and some BSD/X11 licensing. I reorganized the source tree a bit, added some comments especially around interfaces, and wrote a Makefile to build everything. I also added an automated test framework. It's pretty cool; "make check" compiles test programs, runs them in the recorder, and then runs test Perl scripts that query the database and examine the query results to make sure they look good. Right now there's only one test, a program that just calls a small function five times, and the test just verifies that the query engine finds five function calls. But it's a good start, and it means that even though there is no UI --- just bare infrastructure --- people can verify that the code is working and see how to get the tools running. The test script also shows how you can do potentially cool things by scripting the query engine.

Anyway, the project is hosted at Google Code. There is an initial code drop there. People should be able to download the tarball, unpack it, and run "make all check" on a Linux system and see the test program being recorded and the query engine running.

Thanks to Novell people --- especially Jared --- for helping make this happen!

I've got some ideas about how I'd like the UI to work in Eclipse. Just recently I figured out what I think is the right way to integrate a source code view with views over history. I don't know whether I'll ever have time to implement them though! Need to catch up on my real work :-).