#33 pstree: Move full thread name display to patch

[Allan Wirth]

The pstree thread name patch included in the most recent version can generate very long and verbose outputs that display information that system administrators are not interested in.

On my debian (Jessie/Sid) system, the difference between before and after the patch is 69 to 156 lines (see attachment). Most of these lines are from threads for applications like firefox and thunderbird (iceweasel and icedove), that each have more than 20 uniquely named threads.

In short, I believe that with showing the full thread name, though interesting, the ability to use pstree to gain a quick and brief overview of the state of the processes running in a system is lost.

To this effect, I've attached a patch that reverts pstree by default to the old behavior, and adds an option -t that will show the full names of the threads (the new behavior). I considered instead making an option so that the new behavior is "opt-out" and not "opt-in", but I figured I would leave that decision up to the maintainers instead. "opt-in" seems better to me though, because I figure the full thread name information is probably only useful to developers, and not to end users.

[Craig Small]

Hello Allan,
The uncompacting was an unintended consequence of showing the threads. I agree by default it should be off unless you explicitly wanted it with an option. Commit [265fa4] has largely your patch in it, with some minor
document changes.

Thankyou for the patch.