[e-lang] Wanted: Updoc Sandbox for E Spec Tests

[Kevin Reid]

Thomas Leonard, you might be interested in this since I see you've  
been looking at updoc infrastructure recently:


The current plan is that the official E specification, and test suite,  
is everything in <http://wiki.erights.org/wiki/ 
Category:E_specification> and its subcategories. Since it's a wiki,  
this means that we need to be able to run the updoc without giving it  
dangerous access to the local machine.

(Side project: Write a system which allows easy downloading of all  
test suite pages, *as of any given date*.)

E-on-Java currently has updoc --confine, but that is, IIRC, notably  
useless since it doesn't have stdout, for example. E-on-CL does  
slightly better, but still doesn't have e.g. file access.

The project, then, is to create an Updoc sandbox which provides as  
much *safe* functionality as possible. This includes, for example,  
providing a <file> object which looks just like the privileged <file>  
object but operates in a subdirectory (virtual chroot) so that tests  
of the *actual* E file system access code can be written. This also  
makes it trivial to avoid problems with revealing machine-specific  
pathnames.


Having this will greatly help with writing the E specification  
(because tests will be moved onto the wiki, which will provide a  
motivation to write spec text around them to explain and organize  
them), and achieving implementation interop (because there is a common  
test suite).

-- 
Kevin Reid                                  <http://switchb.org/kpreid/>