[GRASS5] GRASS library refactoring paper

[Markus Neteler]

Hi developers,

a new paper is available:

M. Di Penta, M. Neteler, G. Antoniol and E. Merlo, 2002, Knowledge Based
Library Refactoring for an Open Source Project. WCRE 2002, Working
Conference on Reverse Engineering, Oct. 28 - Nov. 1, Richmond, Virginia, USA
(submitted)

http://mpa.itc.it/markus/tmp/wcre2002dipenta.ps.gz (120kb)
http://mpa.itc.it/markus/tmp/wcre2002dipenta.pdf   (280kb)

ABSTRACT:
"Software miniaturization is a form of software re-factoring focused on
reducing an application to the bare bone. Porting an application on a
hand-held device is very likely to require a preliminary step of software
miniaturization, plus the development of device drivers dedicated to the new
environment and hardware architecture.

This paper presents the process and the lessons learned re-factoring a large
Open Source application to get rid of extra fat, to introduce shared
libraries, to remove circular dependencies among libraries and, more
generally, to minimize inter-library dependencies. While the final goal was
to fully exploit shared libraries capabilities, among the various
possibilities we defined a process based on the existing knowledge about the
application, and aimed to minimize the maintenance effort required by the
miniaturization activities."

Detailed data can be delivered (proposed library clusters etc) if there
is interest.

Markus