D23 General Platform Maintenance

Overview

The purpose of the platform corrective and evolutive maintenance is to address bugs and feature requests reported either by mail or through the appropriate trackers on SourceForge.

The noticeable new features in the main platform for the past year are listed below:

• Mathematical Language V2 (releases 1.0 and upper)

The new version of the mathematical language is supported.

See Event-B Mathematical Language.

• Theorems everywhere (releases 1.0 and upper)

It is possible to mix theorems and regular predicates in axioms, invariants and guards.

• Auto-completion (releases 1.0 and upper)

When entering a predicate or expression in the Event-B machine / context editor, it is possible to type C-Space to see a list of possible identifiers that could be entered at the cursor position.

• Entering mathematical symbols (releases 1.1 and upper)

The Rodin platform provides many more ways to enter mathematical symbols:

- either type the ASCII shortcut (as in previous releases),

- or type the LaTeX command (as defined in style bsymb),

- or click in the Symbol Table view which displays the symbols graphically,

- or directly enter the Unicode value of the symbol (for advanced users).

See Rodin Keyboard.

See the Release Notes and the SourceForge databases (bugs and feature requests) for details about the previous and upcoming releases of the Rodin platform.

Motivations

The main evolutions of the Rodin platform are driven by the description of work for the DEPLOY project and the requirements expressed by industrial WP1 to WP5 partners or by consultants during the lifecycle of the project.

Beyond that, any user registered on SourceForge may record any encountered bug on the Rodin platform or request a new feature, using the dedicated trackers. Depending on the category, the bug / feature is assigned to the WP9 partner who is in charge of its treatment:

Category	Partner
AnimB	Christophe METAYER
B2LaTeX	University of Southampton
Decomposition	Systerel
Event-B core	Systerel
Event-B interface	Systerel
Event-B POG	Systerel
Event-B provers	Systerel
Event-B static checker	Systerel
PRO-B	Dusseldorf
Renaming	University of Southampton
Requirements	Dusseldorf
Rodin platform	Systerel
Text editor	Dusseldorf
U2B	Southampton

The priorities are discussed during the WP9 meetings (a management conference call is planned every two weeks, and the WP9 meetings are organised during the DEPLOY workshops).

Choices / Decisions

The WP9 partners have agreed on a release policy (see the Rodin Platform Releases wiki page). In particular:

• A new version of the Rodin platform is released every 3 months.
• The code is frozen during the 2 weeks preceding each release.
• The Eclipse versioning policy is enforced (See Version Numbering).
• A wiki page is dedicated to each release.

The main advantages, for both developers and end-users, are summarized below:

• Information. The wiki page dedicated to each release provides instant information on the new features and improvements, which may be discussed if necessary.
• Validation. The period of code freeze is more especially devoted to bug fixes, and the frequency of the stable releases is ensured.
• Integration. A synchronization between the optional plug-ins and other plug-ins is now possible.

Available Documentation

The following pages give useful information about the Rodin platform releases:

• Release notes.

See Rodin Platform Releases.

More details are provided in the notes distributed with each release (eg. [1]).

• Bugs.

See [2].

• Feature requests.

See [3].

Planning

The Rodin Platform Releases wiki page lists in particular the upcoming releases and give the scheduled release dates.

Special efforts will be made on the following topics:

• Team-based development.

The purpose is to perform simultaneous developments.

In order to understand the problem properly, some usage scenarios (see Scenarios for Team-based Development) for team-based Development have already been written, and a page has also been started to express merging proofs scenarios (see Scenarios for Merging Proofs).

A prototype plug-in is available, which enables the use of the EMF compare editor for machines and contexts. The DEPLOY partners will try out this plug-in and gather requirements for the teamwork plug-in.

See EMF Compare Editor Investigation (Implementation issues).

See EMF Compare Editor installation (How to install the EMF Compare editor).

See Teamwork Requirements (Feedback page / Requirements).

• Documentation.

The purpose is to continuously increase the available documentation on the Wiki. It may contains requirements, pre-studies (states of the art, proposals, discussions), technical details (specifications), teaching materials (tutorials), user's guides, etc. The intended audience may be the developers or the end-users.