WG211/M15Lawall

Prequel: A Patch-Like Query Language for Commit History Search
Julia Lawall, Inria

The commit history of a code base such as the Linux kernel is a gold mine of information on how evolutions should be made, how bugs should be fixed, etc. Nevertheless, the high volume of commits available and the rudimentary filtering tools provided mean that it is often necessary to wade through a lot of irrelevant information before finding example commits that can help with a specific software development problem. To address this issue, we propose Prequel (Patch Query Language), which brings the descriptive power of Coccinelle semantic patches to the problem of querying a commit history. In this talk, we will provide motivating examples, and present the preliminary design of the language.

This is preliminary, unpublished work. The work is being carried out in collaboration with Quentin Lambert and Gilles Muller, of Inria.