RuleChecker has not been used in LHCb since a long time. The following instructions are obsolete.

RuleChecker is a tool for checking the compliance of C++ code with the LHCb C++ coding conventions. It is a product developed in collaboration with the IRST institute and with the Alice and ATLAS collaborations.

The tool has been customised to check a certain number of LHCb coding conventions, and has been interfaced with CMT.

Checking a package with RuleChecker

• Case 1: The .cpp source files are located in a "standard" place, either directly in <$PACKAGEROOT>/src, or in the subdirectories <$PACKAGEROOT>/src/Lib, <$PACKAGEROOT>/src/component
  
  cd <$PACKAGEROOT>/cmt
  make RuleChecker
  
  
• Case 2: The .cpp source are in a non-standard location. In this case you have to tell CMT where RuleChecker should look for the files, by adding a line to the requirements file - e.g.:
  
  document rule_checker BrunelChk -group=RuleChecker ../src/BrunelSicb/*.cpp
  
  (here the source files of the Brunel package are located in the directory <$BRUNELROOT>/src/BrunelSicb)
  
  Then use the same command as in Case 1:
  
   cd <$PACKAGEROOT>/cmt
  make RuleChecker

In both cases, a <$PACKAGEROOT>/Check directory is created which contains one file per class (with filename equal to the class name, and filetype .viol) and a file <PACKAGE>Chk.html containing a summary table.

The table summarises the number of times each rule is violated for each class of the package. The .viol files are the detailed output of the tool, identifying each rule violation rather like a compiler output.

Caveats

Please note that this is the first release of this tool. While the tool produces reasonable output in many cases, there are a number of known problems:

• The current version of the tool fails to parse certain C++ constructs, in particular templates. When it encounters a problem, it returns an error code that prevents make from processing the remaining files. You can get round this problem by telling make to ignore errors:
  
  make -i RuleChecker
  
  It is expected that this problem will be fixed in the next release of the tool by IRST, scheduled for 31/12/2001.
  
• Only a subset of the LHCb rules is currently checked. Some rules are too subjective to be checked by a tool, while others require modifications to the tool provided by IRST. It is expected that more rules will be implemented in the coming months, in particular in cases where the LHCb rules are similar to corresponding ATLAS or Alice rules.
  
• The implementations of the LHCb rules are sometimes not entirely correct, or incomplete. Any such problems should be reported to Marco Cattaneo....
  

Tool Installation and packaging

This section documents how the tool is installed at CERN, and how to modify and install new versions. Please ignore this section if you are only interested in running the current version of the tool.

The RuleChecker tool consists of two packages, installed in $LHCBSOFT/Tools:

• IRSTTool is the code distributed by IRST. Installation instructions can be found in the file $LHCBSOFT/Tools/IRSTTool/README.
• RuleChecker is an LHCb package containing the implementation of the LHCb coding rules. It is maintained in CVS in the standard way. Installation and modification instructions can be found in the file $LHCBSOFT/Tools/RuleChecker/pro/doc/install.notes.

In order to tell CMT where to find the tool, a line has been added to the requirements file of the ExternalLibs package. Please contact Florence Ranjard if you wish to customise this for your site:

set IRST_DIR "${LHCBHOME}/software/NEW/Tools/RuleChecker/pro"

The patterns required to tell CMT what to do in order to execute the RuleChecker are defined in the GaudiPolicy package: the requirements file contains the following global pattern and the following fragment declarations:

pattern -global RuleChecker \
  document rule_checker <package>Chk -group=RuleChecker \
  ../src/*.cpp ../src/Lib/*.cpp ../src/component/*.cpp

make_fragment rule_checker -header=rule_checker_header \
                                                                  -trailer=rule_checker_trailer -suffix=viol
make_fragment rule_checker_trailer

The corresponding fragments (rule_checker_header,rule_checker,rule_checker_trailer) are in the cmt/fragments subdirectory of GaudiPolicy.