Re: Clang and DragonFlyBSD

["Sascha Wildner" <saw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 14 Oct 2011 05:05:41 +0200, Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado  
<iam@juanfra.info> wrote:

> Hi. I remember in the past someone tried compile DragonFlyBSD with clang
> and corrected various warnings and errors. I don't know if this person
> continues with this "project" but I think no. Also a few days ago I
> found this old page in the wiki
> http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/clang/ .

Alex Hornung and I did some clang work in the past.

Yeah, the wiki page is old and not up-to-date.

> DragonFlyBSD works very good with GCC but also clang is very good
> reporting errors or inconsistencies in the code. This week I've found a
> intermediate solution for to have the best of both worlds without extra
> work.
>
> In the "tools" directory of clang exists a tool for generate the same
> reports of clang but without using clang for compile. scan-build is a
> (perl) wrapper for gcc and generates html reports with the warnings and
> errors of clang, but stills compiling the code with gcc (or other
> compiler). http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/scan-build.html .
>
> I think this tool is perfect for complement the daily snapshots build.
> The developers don't need work with two compilers different and they can
> look just the results in the server. scan-build generates static
> html files, so you can copy the directory with the results to
> http://mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org/snapshots/ .
>
> Example:
> # cd /usr/src
> # scan-build make nativekernel

I've done many a scan-build on both our world and our kernel in the past  
and fixed things.

The thing with scan-build is that you'll have to wade through all the HTML  
to find the few issues that are actually _worth_ fixing.

Not everything it reports is something we want to fix (for various  
reasons), some categories are more interesting than others, and some are  
simply false positive, etc.

I wouldn't want to run it daily as part of the snapshot build though, as  
it takes a lot of time.

My overall experience is that people will be enthusiastic to get such  
reports when you ask, but if you put them up, everyone quickly goes on to  
do other things after viewing the first three reports or so, because it  
really takes time to review. The issues worth fixing are not delivered on  
a silver plate unfortunately. :)

> This command generates the binaries with gcc but create a directory
> with the reports in /tmp:
> http://juanfra.info/bugs-y-listas/clang-dragonflybsd-201110/dragonflybsd-scan-build-2011-10-13-2.tar.xz
> (download, decompress and open the index.html file)
>
> The clang version in pkgsrc doesn't install scan-build. I've reported
> the problem to the maintainer. Anyway, exists a temporary solution for
> this problem:

I usually take clang's trunk which should build fine on dfly (though I  
haven't tried lately) and copy the scan-build stuff to /usr/local/bin.

> - Install clang from pkgsrc.
> - Download the latest build for OSX of scan-build from
> http://clang-analyzer.llvm.org/installation.html .
> - Console:
> # tar -xjf checker-257.tar.bz2
> # cd checker-257
> # rm -Rf bin # (with this scan-build will use the clang in PATH)
> # export PATH=$PATH:`pwd`
> # cd /usr/src
> # scan-build make buildkernel
>
> Let me know if you have any question. Cheers :)