[PATCH] tracedump: add --help and --function-histogram

[José Fonseca]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 3:48 PM, Zack Rusin <zack at kde.org> wrote:
> On Wednesday, September 07, 2011 05:21:53 AM Alon Levy wrote:
>> ---
>>  trace_parser.cpp |   11 +++++++++++
>>  trace_parser.hpp |    5 +++++
>>  tracedump.cpp    |   20 ++++++++++++++++++--
>>  3 files changed, 34 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
>
> Hi, Alon.
>
> It's great to see you start contributing to the project. But FWIW I don't
> think this is the right approach.
>
> Most importantly parser shouldn't do any analysis of the trace. It's just too
> crucial to have it do anything but parsing.

Yes, the right place for this would be a new class derived from
Parser, which also lives in the common library, so that it can be
leveraged by the GUI too, but does not adds overhead for other Parser
users.

> I'm not sure if having trace dump not do trace dumping in certain cases is a
> good idea. I know you did it because there's no better place to put it right
> now but I think a lot better approach would be to create a new tool, e.g.
> tracestats, that would along the histogram dump average/min/max number of
> calls per frame, size of data downloaded by the gpu on each frame and so on.

I envision "git style" CLI, i.e., "<tool> <command> <args> ...", e.g.:

  apitrace dump foo.trace
  apitrace stats foo.trace
  apitrace reenc foo.trace

Whether the individual command are actually separate executable or not
is an implementation detail.

> Finally,  tbh, I'd vastly prefer if trace visualization would be done in the
> gui rather than writing tools that keep doing the same thing gui is supposed
> to be doing, but that might be just my preference.

I agree that that's the ideal. But modifying the GUI requires
familiarity with GUI development in general and Qt in particular. I
have neither myself, and can't do more than trivial changes in the
GUI.  So I don't oppose having features developed as command line
tools or even scripts, as a prototype or a stepping stone to have them
implemented in the GUI in the future.

In my point of view,  script, CLI, and GUI  is a list ordered of
increasingly usefulness, but also increasingly development difficulty.

Jose