Motivation

Motivation: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2012-December/175232.html

We want to slurp the results from static code analysis into a database, which means coercing all of the results into some common interchange format, codenamed “firehose” (which could also be the name of the database).

The idea is a common XML format that all tools can emit that:

together with a simple Python API for working with the format as a collection of Python objects (creating, write to XML, read from XML, modification, etc)

The data can be round-tripped through both XML and JSON.

There is a RELAX-NG schema for validating XML files.

References to source files in the format can include a hash of the source file itself (e.g. SHA-1) so that you can uniquely identify which source file you were talking about.

This format would be slurped into the DB for the web UI, and can have other things done to it without needing a server: e.g.:

  • convert it to the textual form of a gcc compilation error, so that Emacs etc can parse it and take you to the source
  • be turned into a simple HTML report locally on your workstation

Projects using Firehose: