On Sun, 7 Oct 2007, Dirk Mueller wrote: >> Julian and I have been discussing for a while the idea of creating a >> category of "experimental" tools in the Valgrind source tree. These >> would be tools that are not necessarily mature, but may be of interest >> to people. This would make it much easier for users to try out >> experimental tools -- they would be included in the Valgrind distribution >> -- which in turn might accelerate their development. > > some of the experimental tools available require significant (and conflicting) > changes to the core, which is the reason e.g. distributions have troubles > packaging the addon experimental tools.
Is that an argument for or against the proposal, or just a general comment? Tools that required big core changes would be less likely to be accepted, although it would be decided on a case-by-case basis. GCC provides a reasonable comparison point -- they have a lot of different platforms, some of which are "primary" and some are "secondary", and (AIUI) they're generally happy to add secondary platforms so long as someone maintains them, but new platforms generally have to fit into the existing framework. >> These tools would be given an "exp-" prefix to their name to indicate >> their experimental nature, and they would be marked clearly as experimental >> on the website and in the manual. Experimental tools could lose the "exp-" >> prefix once they reached a certain level of maturity and popularity. > > what about documentation that is written with the exp- prefix, which then > becomes out of date? broken user habits/custom scripts? That doesn't worry me particularly. We've broken backward compatibility in the past on such things. Also, the possibility of a future name change would be made clear in the documentation on experimental tools, so there'd be an inherent "user beware" aspect to them. I also don't think most of them would be particularly widely used -- Memcheck accounts for over 80% of Valgrind usage. > Tagging valgrind assertions/crashdumps/warning output with a clear indication > that an experimental plugin was run (sort of tainting-concept) seems more > useful to me. We could do that in addition. Some extra information that might be of interest: at one point Julian and I were considering having two versions of the distribution, "valgrind" and "valgrind+extras", due to concerns that if the experimental tools were of a lower quality that they might hurt Valgrind's reputation. But that would make building/testing/installing more complicated, and it would reduce the exposure of the experimental tools, since lots of people would probably not install the extras. The "exp-" prefix seems like a good compromise because it means the experimental tools are widely available, but still making it very clear that they are experimental. Nick ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Valgrind-developers mailing list Valgrind-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/valgrind-developers
