Re: [Valgrind-developers] RFC: Experimental tools

[Dirk M. <dm...@gm...>]

On Friday, 5. October 2007, Nicholas Nethercote 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. 

> 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becomes out of date?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?

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. 

Greetings,
Dirk