Doorstop Issues

[Chris Johns]

On 20/4/20 1:14 am, Sebastian Huber wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am about to add the next couple of hundred specification items for the 
> RTEMS pre-qualification activity. Before I do this, I would like to 
> present some issues that popped up during my daily work with Doorstop. 
> Doorstop is a requirements management tool which was selected for the 
> pre-qualification activity:
> 
> https://docs.rtems.org/branches/master/eng/req-eng.html#selected-tool-doorstop 
> 
> 
> I am quite happy that Jan Sommer suggested to use this tool. I has some 
> pretty nice features. In particular, I think the file based organization 
> in YAML format forming a directed acyclic graph is really the right 
> thing for this project. However, it turned out that it lacks the 
> required flexibility.
> 
> 1. Its use case is requirements management. So it has some standard 
> attributes useful in this domain, like derived, header, level, 
> normative, ref, reviewed, and text. However, I want to use it more 
> generally for specification items and these attributes make not always 
> sense. Having them in every item is just overhead and may cause confusion.
> 
> 2. The links cannot have custom attributes, e.g. role, enabled-by.
> 
> 3. Inside a document (directory) items are supposed to have a common 
> type. I would like to store at a hierarchy level also distinct 
> specializations.
> 
> 4. The verification if the items is quite limited. We need verification 
> with type-based rules.
> 
> 5. The UIDs in combination with the document hierarchy lead to 
> duplication, e.g. a/b/c/a-b-c-d.yml. You have the path (a/b/c) also in 
> the file name (a-b-c). You cannot have relative UIDs in links (e.g. 
> ../parent-req) . The specification items may contain multiple 
> requirements, e.g. min/max attributes. There is no way to identify them.
> 
> I will probably stop using Doorstop and use a custom tooling.

Have you discussed these issues with the Doorstop project?

> With 
> Python, this is quite easy. I already have the infrastructure for this in:
> 
> https://git.rtems.org/sebh/rtems-qual.git/

Why not place the tool in the rtems-tools repo? This repo exists for 
this purpose.

> I will try this out with the new build system.

I suppose this is something else in the queue to review....

Chris