The new release plan

Last week I made a list of things that I wanted to do after reading Production OSS. Today I took the time to implement two of the items on the list, which reduces the list to only thirteen items. Luckily, the tasks on the list are not difficult to implement, but they do take some time to think about the best way to implement them.

The first thing on the list was bringing the website up to date. It still had some pointers to the build-farm in Utrecht and some tips to work around missing functionality that actually exists nowadays. I also tried to make it more clear what the intention of the project is, although I think it can still be made more explicit. Fortunately, this is also an item on the list :)

A second item on the list was the cause for a large number of mails from Jira send to the psat-commit-list. I made up a new release plan of PHP-Sat / PHP-front and also removed some issues/features that where no longer wanted. Let us take a look at the new milestones for the two main projects:

PHP-Front:
The 0.1 release must be capable of parsing, pretty-printing and reflection on PHP4 and PHP5 code. Furthermore, constant propagation need to be supported for procedural code without function calls. Within the 0.2 release this support is to be extended towards function calls and object creation. Support for more information about the environment of PHP, for example the types of internal functions, is planned for version 0.3.

PHP-Sat:
The release structure is closely related to that of PHP-Front. Within the 0.1 release it must support procedural code without function calls and object creation. These language constructs must be supported within release 0.2. The purpose of the 0.3 release is to add many new bug patterns.

In both projects we can see that the number of issues that need to be fixed before the first release is quit low. So hopefully we can make a first release around the end of the year!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hello, i start to play with php-sat & Co, despite the installation process and the installation documentation which is a bit 'too short' somethime :) especially when you can use your fancy installer :) I succeed in launching the tools, and i start to collect results.
So, the big question, is, do you plan to describe how to define customized rules for analyzing code ?

Eric Bouwers said...

> Hello, i start to play with php-sat
> & Co,
Cool!

> despite the installation process and the
> installation documentation which is a
> bit 'too short' somethime :) especially
> when you can use your fancy installer :)
Mmm, please let me know if there are any gaps in the documentation and how you filled in the gaps. There is always room for improvement :)

> I succeed in launching the tools, and
> i start to collect results.
Good to hear!

> So, the big question, is, do you plan
> to describe how to define customized
> rules for analyzing code ?
Well actually, there is already a way to describe custom rules. Simply write your own Stratego program which uses the php-front/php-sat library to apply and analyze your custom rules. If you take the existing bug-patterns as a starting point you should be able to get a kick-start.

On the other hand, I can completely imagine that this is too much effort in order to get the right results in a short time. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to easily define custom rules in for example XML, nor are there any short-term plans to facilitate such a thing.

Still, it would be nice to have a help-page that explains how to add a bug-pattern within the current code-base. I'll see what I can do!