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