Re: [Valgrind-users] RFC: more flexible way to show or count as error or suppress leak kinds

[John R. <jr...@bi...>]

On 11/28/2012 02:56 PM, Philippe Waroquiers wrote:
> Currently, Valgrind does not provide a fully flexible
> way to indicate which leak kinds to show,
> which leak kinds to consider as an error,
> and which leak kinds to suppress.
> This is a.o. described in bugs 284540 and 307465.

> Here are the new command lines args:
>     --show-leak-kinds=kind1,kind2,.. which leak kinds to show?
>                                             [definite,possible]
>     --errors-for-leak-kinds=kind1,kind2,..  which leak kinds are errors?
>                                             [definite,possible]
>         where kind is one of definite indirect possible reachable all
> none
> 
> (note: old arguments are kept for backward compatibility).

This is good as far as it goes.  The presentation in the output from
"valgrind --help" will matter, and so will the explanation given
in the user manual.  Just finding and understanding the new options
is a significant barrier to usability.  Try to write things so that
applying "grep" gives good hints about where to read further.
(This may include rewriting _other_ pieces in order to reduce
"false positive" usage of key words.)

More generally, why isn't this controllable by a loadable Python module,
complete with defaults (including a complete default error handling module)
and introspection?  There should be ways to find
all existing suppressions, how many times each one has been applied
so far, the current traceback, the "type" of the current error, etc.
If coregrind doesn't want to deal with Python, then have gdb do it.

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