[Valgrind-developers] Support for external skins [was: Re: [Valgrind-users] Why not calltree]

[Josef W. <Jos...@gm...>]

On Tuesday 22 April 2003 00:29, Nicholas Nethercote wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Apr 2003, Josef Weidendorfer wrote:
> > * V should install vg_skin.h (and all its dependents) together with
> > valgrind.h. This at least would make it possible to adjust compilation of
> > an external skin to various V skin interface versions. At the moment, I
> > ship my own vg_skin.h (a copy). Thus I have to ship 2 packages, one for
> > interface 1.2 (used till Valgrind 1.9.5) and one for interface 2.0
> > (current CVS), if I want to support both.
>
> So you just want vg_skin.h (and its dependents) to be installed in
> $prefix/include/valgrind/ -- is that enough?  Is this only necessary
> because of the two interface versions?  Hopefully the interface won't
> change much in the future...

As I see it, vg_skin.h does export the Valgrind skin API. Not more, not less.
The API, together with the API version, is everything an external skin ever 
needs.
If there is more in vg_skin.h, this should be changed somehow.

If you are strong against installing vg_skin.h, there at least should be a 
possibility to detect the skin API version of the installed V by adding 
"valgrind --skin-version". This way, I could distribute multiple "vg_skin.h" 
for different API versions on my own and choose the right one at compilation 
time.
Currently, I detect the valgrind version and have a fixed mapping to the skin 
API version. But, as I saw, Valgrind CVS now has versions like 
"valgrind-cvs-head-2003-04-23".
Thus, my automatic detection of the valgrind version doesn't work any more :-(


>
> > * How to integrate external skin documentation into V documentation? Has
> > anyone an idea for this? Perhaps an index update script to be run at skin
> > installation? We could use the valgrind script itself for this: "valgrind
> > --update-docindex". This should search for all
> > <prefix>/share/doc/valgrind/*_main.html and generate a start page.
>
> Hmm, sounds complicated.  Not that I can think of anything better, but it
> feels like there should be a neater solution.  Does external skin
> documentation even need to be integrated...?

Perhaps you are right. I just thought about how to find the documentation at 
all, from a user point of view. Following UNIX tradition, there should be man 
pages for command line tools.

Josef