SYMake: a build code analysis and refactoring tool for makefiles

Authors:
Ahmed Tamrawi;Hoan Anh Nguyen;Hung Viet Nguyen;Tien N. Nguyen
Affiliations:
Iowa State University, USA;Iowa State University, USA;Iowa State University, USA;Iowa State University, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 27th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
Year:
2012

Citing 3
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Abstract

Software building is an important task during software development. However, program analysis support for build code is still limited, especially for build code written in a dynamic language such as Make. We introduce SYMake, a novel program analysis and refactoring tool for build code in Makefiles. SYMake is capable of detecting several types of code smells and errors such as cyclic dependencies, rule inclusion, duplicate prerequisites, recursive variable loops, etc. It also supports automatic build code refactoring, e.g. rule extraction/removal, target creation, target/variable renaming, prerequisite extraction, etc. In addition, SYMake provides the analysis on defined rules, targets, prerequisites, and associated information to help developers better understand build code in a Makefile and its included files.