SAT Heritage: a community-driven effort for archiving, building and running more than thousand SAT solvers
This addresses a critical archival and reproducibility issue for the SAT research community, though it is incremental as it builds on existing tools like Docker and GitHub.
The paper tackles the problem of archiving and running over a thousand SAT solvers from decades of competitions, which are currently scattered and hard to compile, by proposing a community-driven tool that enables building or running any solver with a single command.
SAT research has a long history of source code and binary releases, thanks to competitions organized every year. However, since every cycle of competitions has its own set of rules and an adhoc way of publishing source code and binaries, compiling or even running any solver may be harder than what it seems. Moreover, there has been more than a thousand solvers published so far, some of them released in the early 90's. If the SAT community wants to archive and be able to keep track of all the solvers that made its history, it urgently needs to deploy an important effort. We propose to initiate a community-driven effort to archive and to allow easy compilation and running of all SAT solvers that have been released so far. We rely on the best tools for archiving and building binaries (thanks to Docker, GitHub and Zenodo) and provide a consistent and easy way for this. Thanks to our tool, building (or running) a solver from its source (or from its binary) can be done in one line.