The Unbearable Fragility of Software Configuration

Saturday, March 13. 2010

Issue 52 of the Spoofax project in YellowGrass is a perfect illustration of the fragility of software configuration; the presence or absence of a line break makes the difference between a working and a failing system. What is worse is that the error is very hard to detect and requires a hunch from an expert. If the eclipse.ini file would have a proper syntax and static semantic constraints, the error could be caught right on load time, or preferably when editing the file in the first place. Configuration files are models in a domain-specific language that should be treated just like the classes of a Java program.

Posted by Eelco Visser in domain-specific languages, software deployment, software engineering at 18:44 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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It would also have helped if the eclipse binary simply checked its command line arguments (which is essentially what eclipse.ini sets). Wouldn't a full blown language with IDE support be a bit over the top for this purpose?

#1 Zef Hemel (Homepage) on 2010-03-13 20:50 (Reply)

It should be a defined language for which syntax and semantics are checked, somehow. And you want to get clear and early error messages. I guess that IDE support might actually be problematic, if you'd have to start Eclipse to edit it

#1.1 Eelco Visser (Homepage) on 2010-03-13 22:02 (Reply)

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