CRII: SHF: Automatic Building of Software Projects to Support Analysis of Open Software Repositories

CRII：SHF：自动构建软件项目以支持开放软件存储库分析

• 批准号: 1464425
• 负责人: Xiaoyin Wang
• 金额: $ 17.48万
• 依托单位: University of Texas at San Antonio
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-03-01 至 2018-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1464425&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CRII; SHF; Automatic; Building; Software

As more and more software developers choose to host their projects at open software repositories such as Sourceforge and Github, these large repositories have become valuable resources for the development of novel software engineering techniques. They can serve as either data sets for the emerging mining-based software-engineering techniques or subjects for experimental evaluations and empirical studies. However, a major obstacle preventing full utilization of open software repositories is that, while many existing program analysis tools require successfully built projects as their input, software projects typically have only their source code stored in the repositories, and the source code often cannot be built automatically. Therefore, it is often difficult to apply existing program analysis tools to a large number of software projects, which limits the benefit provided by large open software repositories. This research project aims to overcome the above obstacle by providing technique for automatic building of software projects in open software repositories. Specifically, the project mainly explores the following directions: (1) analyzing path expressions and file flows in build configuration files to provide proper parameters and environment variables for build configuration tools (2) resolving missing software dependencies by searching online dependency repositories, and identifying the compatible software dependency files among the search results; and (3) assigning a software project to an appropriate building platform according to its features. The project helps to discover knowledge on the feasibility and effectiveness of automatic software building, and may benefit a large variety of software engineering techniques that take advantage of open software repositories.

随着越来越多的软件开发人员选择在Sourceforge和Github等开放软件存储库中托管他们的项目，这些大型存储库已成为开发新软件工程技术的宝贵资源。它们既可以作为新兴的基于采矿的软件工程技术的数据集，也可以作为实验评估和实证研究的对象。然而，一个主要的障碍，防止开放软件仓库的充分利用是，虽然许多现有的程序分析工具需要成功地构建项目作为其输入，软件项目通常只有其源代码存储在仓库中，源代码往往不能自动构建。因此，它通常是难以应用现有的程序分析工具，以大量的软件项目，这限制了大型开放软件仓库提供的好处。本研究计画旨在克服上述障碍，提供在开放式软体储存库中自动建构软体专案之技术。具体而言，本项目主要探索以下几个方向：（1）分析构建配置文件中的路径表达式和文件流，为构建配置工具提供合适的参数和环境变量;（2）通过搜索在线依赖仓库，解决缺少的软件依赖，并在搜索结果中识别兼容的软件依赖文件;（3）根据软件项目的特点，将其分配到合适的构建平台上。该项目有助于发现关于自动软件构建的可行性和有效性的知识，并可能有利于利用开放软件库的各种软件工程技术。