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== User Experience == | == User Experience == | ||
<!-- If this feature is noticeable by its target audience, how will their experiences change as a result? Describe what they will see or notice. --> | <!-- If this feature is noticeable by its target audience, how will their experiences change as a result? Describe what they will see or notice. --> | ||
Non-technical end-users of Fedora should see no difference. | |||
Fedora python developers should see additional warnings/errors when building Python extension modules. The exact experience will depend on how much we can be sure that an issue is a real problem; we don't want to impact the ability for people to do automated buildouts from PyPI. | |||
== Dependencies == | == Dependencies == | ||
Revision as of 19:46, 25 April 2011
Static Analysis of CPython Extensions
Summary
I'm working on a static analysis tool that can detect common mistakes made in Python extension modules written in C. We'll run it on all such code in Fedora, fixing any problems we find, and send the patches to the appropriate upstream projects.
Owner
- Name: Dave Malcolm
- Email: dmalcolm@redhat.com
Current status
- Targeted release: [[Releases/<number> | Fedora <number> ]]
- Last updated: 2011-04-25
- Percentage of completion: 5%
Detailed Description
Python makes it relatively easy to write wrapper code for C and C++ libraries, acting as a "glue" from which programs can be created.
Unfortunately, there are various mistakes that are commonly made in such wrapper code, and these mistakes can lead to /usr/bin/python leaking memory or segfaulting. There are other mistakes that only manifest as bugs when run on less common CPU architectures.
I'm working on static analysis code for C, to detect common errors in C extension modules for Python. The plan is to integrate this with Fedora's packaging, so that all C extension modules packaged for Python 2 and Python 3 can be guaranteed free of such errors (by adding hooks to the python-devel and python3-devel packages). We can also send fixes for this code as needed to upstream projects, when it reports problems.
For this to be viable, we'll need the tool to achieve a good signal:noise ratio.
Benefit to Fedora
Fedora is already a great environment for doing Python development - having a good-quality static analysis tool integrated into Fedora's build system for python extension modules will make Fedora even more compelling for Python developers. (Naturally the tool will be Free Software, and thus usable on other platforms; but we'll have it first).
The presence of the tool should also make it easier to fix certain awkward bugs, and make it easier to support secondary CPU architectures.
Scope
This involves:
- writing the tool
- ensuring that it works well on historical bugs (examples of real bugs that are now fixed)
- tuning it to achieve a good signal:noise ratio:
- testing it on everything in Fedora:
- analyzing the issues that it reports
- fixing bugs in the tool
- fixing bugs in the software-under-test
- generating a test suite for the tool
- testing it on everything in Fedora:
- itegrating it into the python 2 and python 3 build of Fedora RPMs (python-devel and python3-devel)
- ensuring that it does not substantially increase the time it takes to build the software-under-test
- the selftest suite for the tool will need a performance component; we also need to be careful how we integrate it into Fedora's build system
How To Test
User Experience
Non-technical end-users of Fedora should see no difference.
Fedora python developers should see additional warnings/errors when building Python extension modules. The exact experience will depend on how much we can be sure that an issue is a real problem; we don't want to impact the ability for people to do automated buildouts from PyPI.