[Apparmor-dev] AppArmor Development

[John Johansen]

Jacob I. Torrey wrote:
> John,
>     I have checked out the code and I agree that it isn't the prettiest
> thing I've seen. What functionality should the parser be able to handle?
> I think that quite an extensive overhaul of the code is needed to make
> it cleaner.
> 
yeah, basically a rewrite is needed.

The functionality that is needed is a parser library, so it can be
shared by the various tools (parser, genprof/logprof, merge tool,
profile editor, lint tool, ...)

I see the parser lib split into a few levels/sections
- Basic parsing
  - multiple entry points so that it can be used to parse individual
    statemetns, as well as whole files.
  - manage the generated parse tree objects, iterate over them
  - be able to add delete parsed rules.  eg. a tool may add a rule at a
    time as they are entered.
  - output parse tree as a profile
  - retain comments
- Tree manipulation
  - variable resolution
  - conditional resolution
  - include expansion
- DFA generation and regex manipulation
  - generate the dfa
  - handle regex merging and overlapping
  - output
- Profile loading
  - loading, dumping profiles
- swig wrappers so it can be used by various languages.


I have been doing some work to clean up the dfa code, and plan to
continue with it.  I also started coding a Basic parser in yacc/flex
with multiple entry points but haven't gotten very far (I could dig it
up and send it to you).


john