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4 <strong>Search</strong> result quality<br />
4.8 Auto-generated source code<br />
There are several open-source projects 11 which include automatically generated source code<br />
to a varying degree.<br />
One example is XCB, the X11 C Bindings 12 . The project consists of an XML protocol<br />
description of the wire-level X11 protocol (xcb-proto) and a script to generate the X11 C<br />
Bindings themselves (c_client.py).<br />
Where the very old libX11 contains a lot of old hand-written code, XCB wants to simplify<br />
maintenance of such code by keeping the protocol description in an XML file.<br />
Having a separate description from the code generator is also beneficial since it allows for<br />
X11 bindings for other programming languages to be generated rather easily. <strong>An</strong> example is<br />
xpyb, the X Python Binding.<br />
The problem with automatically generated source code is that it cannot be indexed by<br />
<strong>Debian</strong> <strong>Code</strong> <strong>Search</strong> for multiple reasons:<br />
• Running third-party code is a potential security risk. This is mitigated by the code<br />
being uploaded only by trusted <strong>Debian</strong> Developers, but nevertheless it might make<br />
<strong>Debian</strong> <strong>Code</strong> <strong>Search</strong> unstable.<br />
• Running code before indexing makes the indexing process slow.<br />
• Running code requires the dependencies to be present, which can be solved by installing<br />
the dependencies and running the code in a chroot-environment 13 , but that requires a<br />
lot more resources than simply indexing files.<br />
On the other hand, automatically generated source code is often, and certainly in the case<br />
of XCB, not very valuable to read. This is similar to how the generated assembler code of any<br />
advanced C compiler is likely to not be easy to read. The unavailability of auto-generated<br />
code in <strong>Debian</strong> <strong>Code</strong> <strong>Search</strong> is thus not a very big loss, but undesirable nevertheless.<br />
<strong>An</strong> acceptable workaround for open-source projects might be to include a pre-generated<br />
version (if feasible) in their releases.<br />
11 Undoubtedly also closed-source projects, but that’s out of scope for this work.<br />
12 http://xcb.freedesktop.org/<br />
13 see pbuilder<br />
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