Inferring State (Part II) / Day 26

Today I was continuing in the spirit of finding out what state corresponds to which label that jpf-probabilistic returns. The first thing I noted while looking through code was a method getStateDescription() for ThreadInfo objects, and while I didn't get my hopes up, I tried it didn't work: it returns the state of the thread. Really, no surprise there--but I thought I'd mention it in case anyone was to point it out. Simply too good to be true. Instead I was looking at the VMListener interface in JPF. It seems to implement several methods that can be used to track what goes on during verification (expanding on the ideas of the last post). I fear it might be too detailed: many methods involve threads, which probably isn't terribly important for determining what state the system is in. I wrote up a quick  implementation of the interface, but I'm not sure it'll be useful on it's own--it's got a lot of information, but I'm still not sure what I'm looking for until I settle on a method for determining state. That being said, it'll be useful in future code I'm sure. I'll be exploring more ideas tomorrow.

In addition to the above, I set up bug-tracking (and/or issue tracking) that uses FogBugz. I realize BitBucket had it's own issue tracker, but I wanted something that I could save tasks by directly using Eclipse plug-ins, and Mylyn supports FogBugz. I'm not entirely sold on it yet: I want the issues to be public ideally,  as this is an open-source project, and FogBugz doesn't seem to allow me to do this (though it's possible that anyone with a FogBugz account might be able to see them, but still, hiding them behind a log-in is not something I really like the idea of). I may switch to Bugzilla if I find out it can do that (and I find/set up a host). The bigger issues I'll also list on the BitBucket issues page.

And in case you didn't see it yesterday (I forgot to mention it in the blog), I've updated the Wiki on the jpf-prism page. It's not much, but it has the installation instructions now, and a few other obvious links. It's nice to have a place to put text that might be useful beyond the lifetime of this blog.