[PATCH] D57858: [analyzer] Add a new frontend flag to display all checker options

[Artem Dergachev via Phabricator via cfe-commits]

NoQ added a comment.

Let's land this together with @Szelethus's proposed solution of hiding hidden options (like checkers in D60925 <https://reviews.llvm.org/D60925>). I'm still in favor of hiding alpha checkers (as they are for development only, much like debug flags; i'd recommend hiding them in the CodeChecker UI as well) and we should probably automatically hide options of checker that are hidden. Let's also, indeed, remove the USAGE thingy as it doesn't add much.

So, like, the global picture is as follows. In our case the Driver (i.e., --analyze) is not much more user facing than frontend flags. It's still fairly unusable directly, as our Static Analyzer is generally not a command-line tool. The real user-facing stuff is the GUIs such as scan-build or CodeChecker. These GUIs decide themselves on what options they want to expose. For instance, you have a right to decide that CodeChecker shouldn't support the aggressive mode of the move-checker and don't expose it as an option in your GUI. In this sense it's not really useful to provide a centralized `-help` of all user-facing options.

But it sounds as if you want to change this situation and provide a single source of truth on what are the user-facing options. Particular GUIs can still ignore them, but you don't want to hardcode flags in CodeChecker, but instead you want to rely on clang to provide the list of supported options for you and, as a side effect, for scan-build users (if you also add a scan-build help flag). I'm totally in favor of crystallizing such list of user-facing flags, and this patch sounds like a good step in that direction, assuming that non-user-facing options are hidden.

Now, why do we care about frontend/driver flags when they're unusable by definition? That's because we have a mental trauma after seeing a few powerusers actively explore those flags, observe that they don't work, and then tell everybody that the Analyzer is broken. So there's a threshold, based on a tiny but painful bit of practical experience, that says that documentation of developer-only features on llvm.org or in code comments is fine, but documentation printed by the released binary itself is not fine.


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  https://reviews.llvm.org/D57858/new/

https://reviews.llvm.org/D57858