Fwd: Coverity Open Source Defect Scan of KDE

[Matt Rogers]

Forwarded from kde-devel, since not a lot of people seem to read that list.

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Coverity Open Source Defect Scan of KDE
Date: Wednesday 05 April 2006 21:44
From: Ben Chelf <ben at coverity.com>
To: kde-devel at kde.org, luc.castermans at phillips.com, folkert at vanheusden.com, 
ben at meyerhome.net, aseigo at kde.org, hallvor at engen.priv.no, 
hhees at systemconcept.de, cal at pixelboxx.de, david at dfoerster.net

Hello KDE Developers,

   As some of you may have heard, last month Coverity set up
http://scan.coverity.com as a site dedicated to scanning open source
projects for defects. In just 1 month, over 4500 defects have been
examined by various open source developers, and from what we can tell,
it seems that there have been over 2500 patches to the scanned code
bases! Due to popular request, I’m happy to announce that we’ve added
KDE to the list of projects scanned on the site. For those of you not
familiar with "scan" yet and by way of introduction ...

   I'm the CTO of Coverity, Inc., a company that has technology that
performs static source code analysis to look for defects in code. You
may have heard of us or of our technology from its days at Stanford (the
"Stanford Checker"). The reason I'm writing is because we have set up a
framework internally to continually scan open source projects and
provide the results of our analysis back to the developers of those
projects. To see the results of the project, check out:

http://scan.coverity.com

   My belief is that we (Coverity) must reach out to the developers of
these packages (you) in order to make progress in actually fixing the
defects that we happen to find, so this is my first step in that
mission. Of course, I think Coverity technology is great, but I want to
hear what you think and that's why I worked with folks at Coverity to
put this infrastructure in place. The process is simple -- it checks out
your code each night from your repository and scans it so you can always
see the latest results.

   Right now, we're guarding access to the actual defects that we report
for a couple of reasons: (1) We think that you, as developers of KDE,
should have the chance to look at the defects we find to patch them
before random other folks get to see what we found and (2) From a
support perspective, we want to make sure that we have the appropriate
time to engage with those who want to use the results to fix the code.
Because of this second point, I'd ask that if you are interested in
really digging into the results a bit further for your project, please
have a couple of core maintainers and/or developers reach out to us to
request access. As this is a new process for us and still involves a
small number of packages, I want to make sure that I personally can be
involved with the activity that is generated from this effort.

   So I'm basically asking for people who want to play around with some
cool new technology to help make source code better. If this interests
you, please feel free to register on our site or email me directly. And
of course, if there are other packages you care about that aren't
currently on the list, I want to know about those too.

   If this is the wrong list, my sincerest apologies and please let me
know where would be a more appropriate forum for this type of message.

Many thanks for reading this far...

-ben

  Ben Chelf
  Chief Technology Officer
  Coverity, Inc.

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