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M. Raab:
"Unanticipated Context Awareness for Software Configuration Access Using the getenv API";
in: "Computer and Information Science", Volume 656 of the series Studies in Computational Intelligence; issued by: Springer International Publishing; Springer International Publishing, Switzerland, 2016, ISBN: 978-3-319-40171-3, 41 - 57.

Configuration files, command-line arguments and environment variables
are the dominant tools for local configuration management today. When accessing
such program execution environments, however, most applications do not take con-
text, e.g. the system they run on, into account. The aim of this paper is to integrate
unmodified applications into a coherent and context-aware system by instrumenting
the getenv API. We propose a global database stored in configuration files that in-
cludes specifications for contextual interpretations and a novel matching algorithm.
In a case study we analyze a complete Debian operating system where every getenv
API call is intercepted. We evaluate usage patterns of 16 real-world applications and
systems and report on limitations of unforeseen context changes. The results show
that getenv is used extensively for variability. The tool has acceptable overhead and
improves context-awareness of many applications.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40171-3_4

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/publik_257397.pdf