Re: [PATCH v2 14/14] perf tools: Move subcommand framework and related utils to libapi

[Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo]

Em Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 06:33:15AM -0600, Josh Poimboeuf escreveu:
> On Wed, Dec 09, 2015 at 09:03:43AM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> > 
> > * Josh Poimboeuf <jpoimboe@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > 
> > > > > wouldn't necessarily be a clean split.  It would also possibly create more 
> > > > > room for error for the users of libapi, since there would then be three 
> > > > > config interfaces instead of one.
> > > > 
> > > > Humm, and now that you talk... libapi was supposed to be just sugar coating 
> > > > kernel APIs, perhaps we need to put it somewhere else in tools/lib/ than in 
> > > > tools/lib/api/?
> > > 
> > > Ah, I didn't realize libapi was a kernel API abstraction library.  Shall we put 
> > > it in tools/lib/util instead?
> > 
> > Yay, naming discussion! ;-)
> 
> Oh boy! ;-)
> 
> > So if this is about abstracting out the (Git derived) command-line option parsing 
> > UI and help system, 'util' sounds a bit too generic.
> > 
> > We could call it something like 'lib/cmdline', 'lib/options'?
> > 
> > The (old) argument against making too finegrained user-space libraries was that 
> > shared libraries do have extra runtime costs - this thinking resulted in catch-all 
> > super-libraries like libgtk:
> > 
> >   size /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgtk-3.so.0
> >      text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
> >   7199789   57712   15128 7272629  6ef8b5 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libgtk-3.so.0
> > 
> > But in tools/ we typically link the libraries statically so there's no shared 
> > library cost to worry about. (Build time linking is a good idea anyway, should we 
> > ever want to make use of link-time optimizations. It also eliminates version skew 
> > and library compatibility breakage.)
> > 
> > The other reason for the emergence of super-libraries was the high setup cost of 
> > new libraries: it's a lot easier to add yet another unrelated API to libgtk than 
> > to start up a whole new project and a new library. But this setup cost is very low 
> > in tools/ - one of the advantage of shared repositories.
> > 
> > So I think in tools/lib/ we can continue to do a clean topical separation of 
> > libraries, super-libraries are not needed.
> 
> I definitely agree that for the reasons you outlined, something like
> 'lib/cmdline' would be a good idea.  Except... there's a wrinkle, of
> course.
> 
> The library also includes non-cmdline-related dependencies.  And these
> dependencies are directly used by perf as well.  So if we name it
> 'cmdline', perf would have includes like:
> 
> #include <cmdline/pager.h>
> #include <cmdline/strbuf.h>
> #include <cmdline/term.h>
> #include <cmdline/wrapper.h>
> ...etc...
> 
> So it would be using several functions from the 'cmdline' library which
> are unrelated to 'cmdline'.
> 
> For that reason I would vote to name it 'lib/util'.  But I don't really
> care, I'd be ok with 'lib/marshmallow' if that's what you guys wanted
> :-)

Right, now you see why this wasn't librarised before, huh? Untangling
bits in a way that this gets sane takes a bit of time.

I'm going thru your patchkit to erode it a bit, taking uncontroversial
patches.

I also would just do one thing first, i.e. just move the cmdline parts
to lib/cmdline/, then we would look at the rest. I.e. reduce the problem
first.

Yeah, I haven't looked deeply how difficult that would be :-\

- Arnaldo
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