mtree parsing and manipulation library

• Student: Michal Ratajsky (michal@FreeBSD.org)
• Mentor: Brooks Davis (brooks@FreeBSD.org)

FreeBSD currently includes several tools that work with file system hierarchy descriptions and each contains its own routines to parse and/or manipulate these descriptions.

This project attempts to improve this by designing a library to include all the common code, removing duplications from application code and allowing simple future extensions.

The library will provide an API for specfile-related operations that are currently present in the mtree tool and other tools as well as additional manipulations (filter, merge, update and possibly others) that could be useful to applications in the future or allow expansion of the mtree tool.

The API will be designed to be intuitive, well documented and easily useable by applications.

Some code will be reused from existing applications, mainly from the mtree tool. All reused code will be verified and eventually adapted or rewritten to fit the required abstraction.

The library will include complete API documentation and unit tests.

Applications and libraries that contain mtree code will be modified to use libmtree instead:

• mtree
• libarchive
• makefs
• xinstall

The mtree tool itself will be distributed in the same source tree as libmtree. Both libmtree and mtree will be implemented portably.

(5-10 milestones, with dates, indicating when you hope or expect to be able to complete features. This section is mandatory. Please negotiate these with your mentor to make sure you're not under- or over-estimating the amount of work to be done. Please also make sure the following four dates are included within your milestones)

• May 25: Start of coding
• June 26-July 3: Mid-term Evaluations
• August 17: End of coding (soft)
• August 21 19:00 UTC: End of coding (hard)

(List of steps you plan to use to test your work, as discussed with your mentor)

• https://github.com/mratajsky/libmtree

• GSoC Project Idea