[GSoC] Proposal for "Parse Makefile.am using an AST"

[Matthias Paulmier]

Hello,

I'm a french CS student at the University of Bordeaux. I'm currently following a
masters degree course specialized in network communications and administration.
I've been interested in free software for a couple of years now and have been
willing to help a project for some time, but never found one I could help with a
significant contribution before that.

I have decided to candidate for the project "Parse Makefile.am using an Abstract
Syntax Tree".

The reason I'm choosing this subject over the other one is that I already have
good knowledge about ASTs. I have worked on a small programming language as an
assignment (project here :
<https://services.emi.u-bordeaux.fr/projet/viewvc/compilfinal/> but it is very
poorly written). It is a very basic interpreter for a trimmed Pascal programming
language written in C with Flex and Bison. On this project I've worked on the
syntax and semantic analysis as well the lexer (which is not a big deal with
Flex).

I've already met with Mathieu Lirzin to talk about the project so I have a
general idea of what is expected of this GSoC. From my understanding, both
proposed subjects' goal is to go towards Automake's eventual modularization. The
benefits of generating this AST from a Makefile.am file would be to separate the
different code generation phases, improve the test suite by testing each phase
separately and probably others that it can't think about now.

My knowledge in Perl may be my weak point for this project as I only know a bit
of the syntax. But I am familiar with other programming languages, principally C
and Python.

If you have any suggestions on documents I can read or software I can check to
prepare for this project I'll be glad to check them. I know texinfo is written
in Perl and generates an AST so I'll check that.

Thanks.

--
Matthias Paulmier