Escaping AutoHell: A Vision For Automated Analysis and Migration of Autotools Build Systems

kaestner@cs.cmu.edu (J. Al-Kofahi, T. Nguyen, C. Kästner)
Wed, 01 Mar 2017 14:35:44 -0500

Jafar Al-Kofahi, Tien N. Nguyen, and Christian Kästner. Escaping AutoHell: A Vision For Automated Analysis and Migration of Autotools Build Systems. In Proceedings of the 4rd International Workshop on Release Engineering (Releng), pages 12--15, New York, NY: ACM Press, November 2016.

GNU Autotools is a widely used build tool in the open source community. As open source projects grow more complex, maintaining their build systems becomes more challenges, due to the lack of tool support. Here we propose a platform to mitigate this problem, and aid developers by providing a platform to build support tools for GNU Autotools build systems. The platform would provide an abstract approximation for the build system to be used in different analysis techniques.