Re: Coverity Scan for GNUstep?

[Fred Kiefer]

Over this weekend I tried to set up Coverity for GNUstep base. I chose base 
because it is the most widely used part of GNUstep.

The first thing I had to learn was that Coverity supports Objective-C but only 
in connection with clang. This isn’t documented anywhere but becomes obvious 
when you read through a few dozens of configuration files. So I had to set up a 
clang only system for which I selected Ubuntu 17/10 on a VirtualBox machine. 
For this setup I tried to follow the instructions on 
http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/GNUstep_under_Ubuntu_Linux and they are 
clearly outdated and incorrect. The configuration of GNUstep make needs to 
include „—with-library-combo=ng-gnu-gnu“ and during the compilation of libobjc2 
I had to use make instead of cmake. As I am no expert in this setup I would 
prefer if somebody with a bit more experiences would correct this wiki page. 
This really would help to save others the frustration I did get from not even 
being able to set up the first few steps of GNUstep. Compilation with gcc has 
been straight forward for more then 15 years now. We should get clang/libobjc2 
support onto the same level.

With that finally in place I was able to run the first Coverity analysis. Sadly 
this could only process one third of your source files. For the rest I did get 
error messages like this:

cov-internal-emit-clang-main.cpp:5: assertion failure: 
xlate-ast-types.cpp:1807: assertion failed: ObjCTypeParamType translation not 
implemented.

(I had to type this as copy/paste somehow won’t work from my VirtualBox)

I have no idea whether this is an issue in clang or Coverity or maybe I did 
forget some required setup step. Just from the file names I would say it is 
something Coverity left out when implementing Objective-C support. Maybe 
switching to an older version of clang could help?

The actual scan result ends up in an Sqlite DB you have to upload it to 
Coverity to get some readable information from it. The project is now at 
https://scan.coverity.com/projects/gnustep-base and awaits validation. Somebody 
at Coverity needs to check whether I am actually connected to the project I 
would like to scan. But with most files being left out from the analysis the 
results will be mostly meaningless anyway. I hope to be able to see the results 
in a few days and report whether they look promising or not. In the later case 
I will drop the whole project. Otherwise I would try to reach Coverity and 
discuss the issue with somebody there.

Cheers,
Fred