gmane.comp.parsers.sparse

Ben Greenberg | 22 Jul 19:29

Documentation? Anywhere?

So, I'm new to Linux and to static analysis and so I'm sure I'm not the target
audience for Sparse, but where is all the documentation? The website is
well...sparse, the readme contains nothing helpful and neither does the FAQ. I
compiled Sparse but I have no idea how to use it. There are all these binaries
and none of them accept --help (except for test-suite). Am I missing something?

Basically I'm trying to use Sparse to generate a call graph for a specific
program. I tried using the graph binary which seems to generate XML-like code
but my browser can't read it. Through browsing this message list I found that
people were piping the results of graph through the binaries in the gvpr folder
First of all, how am I supposed to have deduced that the output of graph needs
to be further processed and that the binaries in gvpr are there for that
purpose? Second, when I tried to do that I got an error saying that
/usr/bin/gvpr doesn't exist. Do I need to move the gvpr folder to /usr/bin/ or
is gvpr a separate program? My command is: ./graph flow.c | ./gvpr/return-paths

I don't necesarily need an answer to my specific question, but if someone knows
where to find a how-to or some other documentation that would be great. Thank
you.

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Josh Triplett | 25 Jul 00:23

Re: Documentation? Anywhere?

On Tue, 2008-07-22 at 17:31 +0000, Ben Greenberg wrote:
> So, I'm new to Linux and to static analysis and so I'm sure I'm not the target
> audience for Sparse, but where is all the documentation? The website is
> well...sparse, the readme contains nothing helpful and neither does the FAQ. I
> compiled Sparse but I have no idea how to use it. There are all these binaries
> and none of them accept --help (except for test-suite). Am I missing something?

sparse and cgcc have manpages.  Other than that, you haven't missed
anything.

> Basically I'm trying to use Sparse to generate a call graph for a specific
> program. I tried using the graph binary which seems to generate XML-like code
> but my browser can't read it. Through browsing this message list I found that
> people were piping the results of graph through the binaries in the gvpr folder
> First of all, how am I supposed to have deduced that the output of graph needs
> to be further processed and that the binaries in gvpr are there for that
> purpose? Second, when I tried to do that I got an error saying that
> /usr/bin/gvpr doesn't exist. Do I need to move the gvpr folder to /usr/bin/ or
> is gvpr a separate program? My command is: ./graph flow.c | ./gvpr/return-paths

graph does not generate XML.  It generates graphviz output.  You need
graphviz to work with it; graphviz also includes gvpr.  You do not need
to process the output further; you simply have the option of doing so.
You can directly feed the output of graph to "dot" or one of the other
graphviz tools to get an image.

However, I agree that no obvious connection exists between the "graph"
program and the post-processing scripts in gvpr.

- Josh Triplett

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