1st Coccinelle Users Day, November 25, 2009

Information for participants

The users day will take place at LiP6, 104 avenue de President Kennedy, 75106 Paris, in room 554. To reach the LiP6, you will need to first leave your passport or other form of identification at the reception. In exchange you will receive a badge that allows you to take the elevator "Tokyo" to the 6th floor. On the 6th floor, there is another reception, where you should ask to go to the Coccinelle users day in room 554. The receptionist will then use her badge to let you go to the 5th floor.

Software

The users day will focus on Coccinelle, but some additional tools that have been developed around Coccinelle will also be presented. To prepare for the users day, it would be helpful to have installed the following on your laptop.

Coccinelle itself

• Linux, BSD, or MacOS. The interaction between Coccinelle and Python does not work under Windows. Python is not absolutely essential for working with Coccinelle, but it is very helpful in many situations. If you are using Windows, and option is to install andLinux. Another option is to install Linux in a virtual machine such as Qemu or VirtualBox.
• Coccinelle
• Python: Python 2.6 would be preferable.
• Emacs and Emacs org mode: The use of Emacs is not essential for using Coccinelle, but Coccinelle is able to generate files in "org mode", which contain hyperlinks to positions in code where items of interest occur. This is mostly relevant if you want to use Coccinelle for code searching, for example for finding bugs.

Test data

• The exercises will be using Linux 2.6.31.6 for examples. If you would like to adapt the exercises to some other piece of software, that would be fine as well.

Other tools

• spdiff: Spdiff is a tool for inferring semantic patches from a small collection of example changes. It can thus generate the input for Coccinelle. Spdiff is only available for Linux, for 32 bit machines.
• Herodotos: Herodotos is a tool for tracking the history of code fragments over multiple versions of software. It accepts as input the org mode output of Coccinelle.

  To be able to use Herodotos with PDF output support, you must have at least jgraph, ps2eps and epstopdf installed.

• coccicheck: Coccicheck is a script for managing the application of a set of semantic patches to a software project. This will be discussed briefly, but there will be no exercises associated with it, so it is not essential to download it.