Back after a little break

[José Fonseca]

Hi Carl,


On Sun, Jan 27, 2013 at 12:16 AM, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote:
> Hi apitrace folks,
>
> I've been quiet around here for a while, but I'm changing that now.

Welcome back.

> José, thanks for merging so much of my trim code at the end of last
> year.

I'm still missing merging your trim tests in the tests repository
(trim-auto branch). It's some portability issue -- the tests fail on
some platform -- but I don't remember exactly. I'll get back to  you
on that.

> I'll be following up with some other code I have on hand (a big
> optimization for the dependency tracking and a --trim-spec option so
> that the user can specify a subset of what kinds of automatic trimming
> should be performed).
>
> I've been using commits for both of those for quite some time now, so I
> think they're ready. But I'll rebase them onto the latest master along
> with changes to the test suite to track them carefully.

Sounds good.

> But first, I want to seriously propose "apitrace replay" as the name for
> the interface that replays a trace. I submitted this originally as
> "replay" and José changed it afterwards to "retrace". He had mentioned
> earlier in email that he preferred "retrace" for consistency with the
> existing implementation.
>
> I suggest that for a user, the name of the interface should be as "good"
> as possible and "replay" is objectively better than "retrace". The user
> also doesn't see the implementation so will not be aware of any
> inconsistency.
>
> But if consistency is what's preventing a good name for the interface,
> I'm happy to fix that as well. I've written patches to rename everything
> in the implementation and the test suite from "retrace" to "replay" and
> the test suite still passes.
>
> I'll email these patches[*] out now, and I'll be interested in feedback.

The reasons I pointed to stick with the "retrace" metaphor were (
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/apitrace/2011-October/000082.html
):
- I don't perceive "retrace" metaphor as wrong or particularly bad
- for consistency with the trace metaphor
- for consistency with the project name (apitrace)
- for consistency with what we have (though this might not be clear)

I do believe that changing nomenclature now is a bigger disservice to
our current users than using a more user friendly name.

I hate to refuse this when you already put some work carrying out the
rename. You're obviously a great contributor to apitrace which I don't
want to aggravate. But I really can't accept it. If nothing else, all
the work and time it would require me to update our (VMware's)
internal documentation and scripts for the rename is a showstopper.


I know I'm terribly unimaginative with names. Even the name "apitrace"
itself is source of some regret to me (as it is not unique enough).
But for good or worse, this is the nomenclature we have now, and
changing it is a source of trouble that simply is not worth my while.
I hope you can understand and accept it.


> [*] I'm using email for this since I don't have good network
> connectivity at the moment and it's much easier for me to queue up email
> (which will just go out as soon as I'm connected again) than to queue up
> git pushes.
>
> That said, José, I'm willing to revisit other collaboration
> strategies. Earlier you said you would prefer to work together on
> feature branches within the main repository. I'm willing to experiment
> with that, so let me know what you need from me to get that setup.

All I need is your github user name. After I add you to the commiter
list you're free to add new branches.

Jose