By the way, after discussing with Julien, one thing I need to add to understand our point of view: In TMF, we use a custom XML format with the existing custom XML parser to parse an XML trace, so it's really straightforward to use those traces, we don't need to create a new parser for it.

Geneviève

On 02/04/2014 12:46 PM, Jérémie Galarneau wrote:
On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 12:35 PM, Geneviève Bastien
<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi Jeremie,

Thanks for your reply.


On 02/04/2014 11:19 AM, Jérémie Galarneau wrote:
Hi Geneviève,

I wonder if we are not overly complicating things here... The Python
bindings seem to address your immediate testing concerns and will let
you produce test traces with minimal effort.
Do you have any information, links, examples how to use what exists in
python to generate traces with minimal effort? Our very immediate need is
actually to generate traces manually, because we don't need to know how to
script in python to do this ;-) and we can manually modify the events. But
since I have no idea (yet) what those python bindings do and how they do it,
then maybe I miss something here.

They are part of the current Babeltrace master branch and will be
included in the next release. An example script is available under
babeltrace/bindings/python/examples/ctf_writer.py.
Let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,
Jérémie

Thanks,
Geneviève

While I agree that it doesn't solve the problem of testing analysis on
Windows, I must ask if this really is a primary concern at this point.

I would personally start by writing tests in Python using the
CTF-Writer bindings and then, as the analysis feature gains traction,
work with users to determine the best testing strategy. I somehow
doubt that having an external dependancy on Babeltrace would really be
a problem to these power users...

Sorry for the late reply,
Jérémie

On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:20 PM, Geneviève Bastien
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 02/03/2014 12:16 PM, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Geneviève Bastien" <[email protected]>
To: "Michel Dagenais" <[email protected]>, "Mathieu Desnoyers"
<[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Sent: Monday, February 3, 2014 12:05:38 PM
Subject: Re: [lttng-dev] Human read-writeable format for CTF traces

Ok, I'll wait for Jérémie's answer for more details. As I said, my
concern is to have something fully standalone in TMF. But if one has
access to babeltrace and eventual plugins to read-write a CTF trace to
XML, then all the better. We could then import an XML generated by a
python script into TMF, edit it there and then use it to test analyses.

All we have to settle on is the intermediate format that should be
used.
I'd go for XML because of the possibility to validate it and have
visual
editors.
Michel's idea of going for Python seems even better to generate test
suites.
It would allow importing and combining test "patterns" very easily, thus
allowing to create tests by construction without having to copy-paste
huge
XML files.

I don't clearly see why having external dependencies on other tools
for a TMF CI test suite would be an issue. What would be the main
arguments
for having all those tests stand-alone in TMF for the test-suite ?
It is not just for test suite. XML-defined analysis will need test traces
as
well, and that is in main TMF, not in unit tests (one idea of the XML
analysis is to allow end-user to develop their own analysis without
writing
a single line of code or requiring the TMF development environment). And
the
user of these analysis and test traces may not have access to babeltrace
or
even to a Linux command line.

Thanks,
Geneviève

Thanks,

Mathieu

On 02/03/2014 11:00 AM, Michel Dagenais wrote:
I would expect that the ctf writer API recently added to babeltrace
(currently in master branch), along with the Python bindings that
cover
trace read and write APIs, should allow you to implement things like:

- A plugin to read a CTF trace, and output it in an intermediate
format
      to facilitate edits (e.g. XML as you propose),
- A plugin to read this XML format and output a CTF trace.
Yes, this would indeed be extremely helpful, in XML and/or JSON.

You could also generate the XML trace completely by hand if you like,
and
then convert it to CTF with the second plugin I'm relating to above.
The likely scenario is to add a few events by hand.

Another possibility is that the XML description also allows
describing what the trace contains at a slightly higher level. For
instance, if you
have a periodic event happening for a certain amount of time, it
would
be described in XML, and then "generated" by the XML-to-CTF
converter.
Do we want to describe this in XML or in Python? We could have "CTF"
to
"Python statements" generating XML. Then we could add loops by hand.
We
could also have CTF to XML, with hooks to merge Python generated
events.
Indeed being able to script a trace would be extremely helpful and
convert it either directly to CTF or to the intermediate format. Some
scenarios for unit test would be to script a custom trace then change a
few events for the test purpose, then either import it in TMF or
convert
it to CTF.

Thanks,
Geneviève
In addition, TMF may also want to offer similar functionality, an XML
dump
of events and an XML events reader. Indeed, TMF supports a few formats
other than CTF.

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