Jamie asked me about using splint in his SCons based projects such as filtergen. So the basic way to use SCons and splint together is through the power of pre-actions. Basically this allows you to specify a command to be run before a particular build rule is used. So I added something like this:
for object_file in filtergen_objects:
env.AddPreAction(object_file, env["SPLINTCOM"])
to the filtergen main SConstruct file. The worst part about this is you now need to explicitly have a list of source objects around to pass to your Program builder. This is a bit annoying but not the end of the world. the SPLINTCOM command is setup using hte SCons command interpolation like so:
env["SPLINT"] = "splint"
env["SPLINTFLAGS"] = ["-weak", "+posixlib", "-I."]
env["SPLINTCOM"] = Action("$SPLINT $CPPFLAGS $SPLINTFLAGS $SOURCES")
Currently I'm splint-ing filtergen at the weak level, and it passes, but to really use splint Jamie will need to start using splint at the standard level and fix some stuff up.
When using splint, instead of parsing the standard system headers it uses its own which are firstly splint-clean themselves, and also add annotations to describe memory usage. Unfortunately these headers don't define all the standard functions found in headers, in particular network related ones, so you end up with some ugly code in the source files to deal with this. If I have time I'll try and update the standard set of headers to be more full featured.
I also found that filtergen doesn't really compile very well on non-GNU platforms, but that I'm not about to try and fix that in a clean way. For Jamie's future reference problems involve:
For those that care, which is mostly Jamie, the patches can be merged from my bzr branch: http://benno.id.au/bzr/filtergen.splint