The Free Software & Culture conference FSCONS is held in Gothenburg October 24-26th. Having been there and given talks last year, I can recommend it for anyway interested in what’s going on the free software and culture world.
I’m happy and proud to notice that I have been nominated for their award, for my work on security packages for the GNU project. Too bad I cannot make it to the conference this year.
Inspired by my own OWASP Sweden chapter talk last night, I learned more about Cyclomatic Code Complexity and did some practical experiments.
Cyclomatic Code Complexity was described by Thomas J. McCabe in 1976. Read the Wikipedia entry for the entire story, but in short it is a measure of C code complexity relevent to code testing.
I learned about its practical use from GNUPDF‘s nice cyclomatic report. They use a tool called PMCCABE which happen to be packaged in Debian, so it was easy for me to test it.
I produced reports for some of my projects and some other popular tools, and put them online at:
http://josefsson.org/cyclo/.
Hopefully this will help me and others to find where the complex code is located. Knowing where to look is the first step towards improving things.
In my projects (e.g., gnutls, gnu sasl, shishi, libidn) I use gnulib for portability modules and maintainer scripts. Thus it felt natural to integrate GNUPDF’s custom scripts into a gnulib module. I’m discussing the module now.