YAPC | talks

Barrie Slaymaker

Safari: Implementing a Browser for Revision Controlled Files

45 minute talk

This talk will cover the genesis, implementation and release of Safari as GPLed software. I will present the project life cycle (so far) and the architecture with a Q&A session and a call for contributors.

Safari is a cgi-bin (and mod_perl) web front end for:

• ... browsing materials stored in revision control or configuration management systems. CVS, Perforce (which is what the perl source code is kept in) or MKS Source Integrity are examples of these. This can include source code, HTML files, images, etc. Other back ends, like CPAN or ftp can also be used.
• ... extracting source code commentary using existing tools like Pod::Html (via pod2html) or Cocoon (for C++). Some interesting tools are located here under the heading "Source Code Documentation".
• ... running miscellaneous processing tools like gzip, tar, TeX, GNUPlot, lint, etc. on source files to build final output. Almost any command-line tool or perl module can be integrated, since Safari is built around a GNU make (or around a perl-enhanced GNU/Perl make module if you configure it that way).
• ... automating checkout of web sites from archives used to maintain the web site. Whenever a web page (or other resource) gets checked in, the next user request for it can cause an automatic check out and any preprocesing that's required. Checkouts are only done when necessary: Safari is built around make (using cgimake, which was developed for Safari).

Safari is being prepared for a '1.0 Open Source Release' to coincide with this talk. I'll be publishing it at least a few days before the talk. If all goes well, the (non-HTML) presentation materials will be dynamically checked out and converted to HTML during the talk.

This package was originally written to meet the needs of a client: we were trying to publish our source code on their intranet to foster easy access and discussion so that you didn't have to check out source code just to read it or search it. It has grown in to a system for informal code reviews and for automatically extracting documentation from the source code. It has also turned the source code archives in to a convenient place to store and browse design documentation.

The 'glue' that ties together the scripts and command-line tools that implement pieces of Safari is cgimake: a wrapper around make (or an extended perl version of GNU make). This allows Safari to be very extensible and to use a well understood way of automating processing of source files.