[Valgrind-users] --tool help not too helpful

[Skip M. <sk...@po...>]

I went to file a bug report but was thwarted by the need to create yet
another login to file a simple bug, and find Bugzilla an almost
insurmountable hurdle anyway, so I will just mention my issues and
suggestions here, and hope someone better tied into Valgrind development
will pass it along. (That said, as a former Python core developer, I
realize the need/desire for login credentials.)

I am a brand new Valgrind user, afflicted with some threading problems. I
knew about the "memcheck" tool, but didn't know what any of the other
tools were. While reading the man page, I saw mention of the Helgrind and
DRD tools. "Great!" I thought. Alas, specifying "--tool=Helgrind" or
"--tool=DRD" on the command line resulted in rather vague error:

... failed to start tool '<whatever>' for platform 'amd64-linux': ...

Initially, I thought those tools were simply not available on my
platform. Eventually, though, I figured out that tool names must be given
in lower case. "Helgrind" and "DRD" appear to only be given with those
spellings. I saw one instance of "helgrind" in the man page, but it was
part of a larger compound word. I saw no mention of "drd".

Further, I saw no enumeration of all the available tools. The --help
output says that "memcheck" is the default tool. Any mention in --help
output of other tools was secondary (mentioning tools which support
various options).

So, my recommendations:

1. Briefly enumerate all the possible tools somewhere, together in one
place. This would be great in the man page. I think it would be less
important in the --help output.

2. In --help output, at least mention that the toolname must be spelled in
lowercase, no matter how it is spelled in the documentation.

3. (optional) Allow --tool to operate in a case-insensitive fashion.

Thanks,

Skip Montanaro
sk...@po...