Extracting Configuration Knowledge from Build Files with Symbolic Analysis

Build systems contain a lot of configuration knowledge about a software system, such as under which conditions specific files are compiled. Extracting such configuration knowledge is important for many tools analyzing highly-configurable systems, but very challenging due to the complex nature of build systems. We design an approach, based on SYMake, that symbolically evaluates Make files and extracts configuration knowledge in terms of file presence conditions and conditional parameters. We implement an initial prototype and demonstrate feasibility on small examples.