Enhancing configuration facilities in software development: a logic approach

The paper focuses on the suitability and advantages of a Logic Data Base approach to manage configurational aspects within Programming Environments. It describes part of a work which proposes Logic Data Bases as effective tools to be integrated with existing programming environments to increase their formalization and automation capabilities. In order to present the idea and its implications, we discuss, as a practical example, the integration of a prototype Logic DBMS (EDBLOG) with a Unix-like environment for configuration management. In that framework, a possible realization of the Make facility is shown. The advantages of the proposed approach are mainly concerned with the easiness of extention of the programming environment and of the configuration environment to deal with concepts which, in general, are very expensive to provide,e.g. histories and versions management.