Moving away from tools module

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 05/01/2017 01:05 AM, Chris Sherlock wrote:
>>> On 28 Apr 2017, at 8:22 pm, Michael Stahl <mstahl at redhat.com> wrote:
>> i really don't see the point of this.  the tools module is primarily a toxic waste dump, and distributing the toxic waste across all the other
>> modules does not look like an improvement to me.  better to remove the toxic waste from our git repo and dump it in some landfill where nobody lives, or at least nobody that we know :)
> 
> That does seem to be the consensus :-) however, at least one of the classes is used extensively through our codebase, and I'm not sure what would replace it.., I'm speaking of SvStream.
> 
> Whilst it's not useless or deprecated, I wonder if it was placed in tools because nobody was quite sure where else to put it?

I think you're looking at it from the wrong angle.  Long ago, tools used 
to be the natural choice where to put generic low-level stuff (it being 
the lowest module in the hierarchy).  That's how many of the tools 
include files came about.

Things have changed since them.  Some parts of tools don't make much 
sense any more, some parts are known to be so bad that they shouldn't be 
used any more, some parts have been superseded by facilities elsewhere 
(where that "elsewhere" is often just due to historical reasons, too), 
etc.  And some parts (like SvStream) are likely to stay with us for 
quite some time still.

So while it makes sense to clean away parts that are no longer needed 
and have good replacements elsewhere, it IMO makes no sense to e.g. move 
existing functionality from tools to o3tl.