Proof of concept!
Maintaining any complex system means managing change over time.
One of the best class of tools for this purpose is the package
manager included in various systems. In Gentoo Linux's case,
this is called portage. Unfortunately, when integrating the
portage tool with other systems (such as automated build
systems), it became apparent to me that there was actually no
machine parseable specification to validate so central a unit
of the entire Gentoo system as package names and versions.
Since the developers-that-be decided this was not a problem
(and pointed to a non-machine parseable English language
technical document being developed for Gentoo as the Package
Management Standard, or PMS), I decided that the only thing
for it was to attempt to translate such in to a formal spec
myself. This repository represents the as yet partial result.
The idea is to generate useful code from the specifications such that other platforms and systems can easily validate and verify what is 'supposed' to be happening without having to read a human-language technical document.
So far, we can generate regular expressions for a given entity as well as generate test cases.
We also need to generate IETF standard ABNF, which will fix the remaining bugs in the regex generation. This is only a question of converting strings to hex-encoded entities.
Ideally, we might get some acceptance of this approach (coupled with versioned releases) so that others (package manager maintainers, systems integrators, etc.) can draw from a single formal specification ... removing an entire class of potential bugs in every single package related tool.
perlandrubyare required for running some tests- A C compiler and
makeare required to compile theabnfgenutility that is used to validate the ABNF grammar.