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Triage a directory of legacy SAS macro files

Source: R/sas_triage.R
sas_triage.Rd

Applies an ordered rule ladder to every SAS source file in dir and returns one row per macro definition, each carrying a decision and the evidence that justifies it.

Usage

sas_triage(dir, overrides = NULL)

Arguments

dir

Character. Path to a directory of SAS source files. Use a local clone; the canonical library lives on a network volume where file operations are slow.

overrides

Character or NULL. Path to a `macro_overrides.yaml` recording human decisions. Each entry requires macro, canonical_file, rationale, decided_by, and decided_on.

Value

A data.frame with one row per macro definition and columns file, macro, params, body_hash, line_start, line_end, visibility, decision, rule, and evidence. Rows are sorted by macro then file, so the result is deterministic.

Details

Only the top level of dir is scanned; subdirectories are ignored.

Candidate files are selected by excluding known non-source suffixes (logs, listings, documents, binary data sets, numbered RCS backups) rather than by matching .sas. The library names files with dots as word separators – deciles.hazard and lm.cprobs are names, not stems with extensions – and many macro files carry no extension at all, so a .sas-only pattern silently omits them.

File-level rules, applied first, in order:

  1. Copy of * – drop, as a filename-prefix duplicate.

  2. *.sas~ – drop, as an editor backup superseded by construction.

  3. Fails .sas_lint() – drop, citing the specific lint failure.

Definition-level rules, applied per macro name across surviving files:

  1. [4.] Defined in exactly one file – canonical.

  2. [5.] Defined in several files, all bodies hashing identically – canonical, recording every defining file.

  3. [6.] Defined in several files with two or more distinct bodies – ambiguous. No canonical file is chosen.

Rule 6 never auto-resolves. Modification dates and visibility are attached as evidence for a human, never consumed as a tiebreaker, because a tool that silently picks a winner launders a coin-flip into a committed artifact. Filesystem mtime is deliberately never consulted: the corpus froze in 2019 and lives on a network volume where timestamps do not survive copies.

Ambiguity is resolved by a human writing an entry into overrides and re-running. This makes the result reproducible and auditable.

Examples

# \donttest{
d <- system.file("extdata", "macros", package = "hvtiRutilities")
if (nzchar(d)) sas_triage(d)
# }