[Cs22800] gcc talk...

[Wesley Pegden]

Hi,
I've been writing a script (in C) which I think may be of use to the gcc 
project.

When I first decided to contribute to GCC, I thought I should start with 
very
attainable goal, rather than an ambitious one, so I looked at your "Beginner
Projects" page and started looking through code for #if 0 statements 
that were
old and usesless.  Realizing that what I was doing was pretty machinable, I
wrote a script to do most of that work.  Given a list of source files, the
script goes through the tree, finds #if 0, #endif statements in the source
files, writes them to a separate file (e.g. c-typeck.c.if0s) along with
information as to how long the #if 0 statement has been in place, which the
script gets from cvs annotate.

I know that this seems like a highly specialized script, but I've tried 
to keep
the code adaptable to other "code hunting" problems.  In any case, I was
wondering if I could hand the script over to GNU GCC, as I think it could be
useful in maintaining the cleanliness of code.

Incidentally, I requested a copyright assingment form a couple weeks 
ago, but
never recieved it (I understand there's no full time GCC form sender!).  I
guess  should try to get one of those to sign my script over to GNU GCC?


Thanks, and tell me what you think,
Wes
________________________________________________________________________________

Wesley Alden Pegden <wes at uchicago.edu> writes:


 >> When I first decided to contribute to GCC, I thought I should start
 >> with very attainable goal, rather than an ambitious one, so I looked
 >> at your "Beginner Projects" page and started looking through code
 >> for #if 0 statements that were old and usesless.


Great.  Any patches to show for it?



 >> Realizing that what I was doing was pretty machinable, I wrote a
 >> script to do most of that work.  Given a list of source files, the
 >> script goes through the tree, finds #if 0, #endif statements in the
 >> source files, writes them to a separate file (e.g. c-typeck.c.if0s)
 >> along with information as to how long the #if 0 statement has been
 >> in place, which the script gets from cvs annotate.
 >>
 >> I know that this seems like a highly specialized script, but I've
 >> tried to keep the code adaptable to other "code hunting" problems.
 >> In any case, I was wondering if I could hand the script over to GNU
 >> GCC, as I think it could be useful in maintaining the cleanliness of
 >> code.


This is a nifty thing to have, but I suspect there's a more
appropriate "code maintainer's tools" package that it should be
distributed with, instead of GCC.  But it might be hard to find.

I see no problem putting your script into contrib in the meantime.

zw