tim Rowledge a écrit :
> 
> 
> Alejandro Reimondo's Fenix stuff read (through some extraordinarily 
> 'creative' and Windows dependant code) source snippets from files and 
> built a parallel object hierarchy and then wrote an image out via a 
> modified tracer. It's a very simple idea but rather less simple to 
> implement correctly. It is however certainly doable.
> 
> In principle one could certainly keep a tree of SVN like form, read in 
> the code whilst traversing the tree, create objects to suit and then 
> trace only those objects to create an 'image created from source'.
> 
> And you know what? If we put together a system to do that, there would 
> still be objectors; there will always be objectors.
> 
> tim
> -- 
>

This is the idea of replacing a "binary blob" (the image) with an 
automatically generated "textual blob" (a textual description of the 
object graph, or a script to reconstruct object graph).

Is it usable? A maintainer will use diff tools to check difference 
between two versions.
Unfortunately, a small difference in an Object graph (think graph, not 
tree) might result in a big difference in textual representation. Such 
generator should take care to generate minimal textual diffs... That 
means diffing two general graph, analyzing previous textual 
representation and producing a textual representation closest to 
previous one.

What a maintainer would need, is rather a new diff tool able to perform 
above operation, find the diffs between two images...

A tool that analyzes a foreign image and generates a script able to 
convert this image to the foreign one...

Not simple, a naive implementation would not work, for example because 
of sourcePointers, an image is not independant form it's change files...

Nicolas