[Lldb-commits] [PATCH] Skip symlinks to the original file when searching for debug info

[jingham at apple.com]

> On Feb 23, 2015, at 1:51 PM, Zachary Turner <zturner at google.com> wrote:
> 
> Well I really like to keep ifdefs out of code.  I know that Host is the place for ifdefs, and FileSpec is in Host, but I still like to keep them to a minimum.  It's too easy to break things when you have to try to figure out which ifdef paths you need to modify.  That was the reason for creating the FileSystem class.  It exposes a platform agnostic interface to low level FS operations.  Similar to llvm::sys::fs, and there's probably some duplication there that could be removed, but I just didn't want to break too much stuff at the time.

> 
> I really wouldn't want to see a bunch of ifdefs ending up in FileSpec (there's already some there that I'd like to see removed, as described below).  A lot of what it does is consistent across all platforms and is just focused on splitting apart a string, and constifying the directory and filename portions.  And so I think it would be a shame to muck up this (mostly) platform-agnostic class with some platform specific stuff.  It would be great if there were a way to isolate the disk access part.  I don't think it's too crazy to write something like
> 
> FileSpec MyFile("/usr/bin/foo");
> FileSystem::DirectoryEnumerator Enumerator(MyFile);
> for (FileSpec &Child : Enumerator) {
>     if (FileSystem::IsDirectory(Child)) {
>         // Do something.
>     }
> }
> 
> In fact I think it's even better.
> 1) It improves readability by making it clear that you're hitting the file system, so you should be careful about what type of path you're using.
> 2) It improves modularity by isolating the code that hits the file system from the code that doesn't.
> 3) It cleans up the FileSpec implementation somewhat.  Currently EnumerateDirectory is a big ugly function with a couple of different preprocessor branches.
> 4) Separating the responsibilities like this leads to more flexible usage patterns.  Like having DirectoryEnumerator be an object that can be used in a range-based for loop here, instead of forcing its usage to conform to what you can write with a single function call.

> Anyway, TL;DR of all this is that I know it was originally designed to be all things related to files, but as it grows, it starts to become really heavy.  I think it makes sense to consider a separation of responsibilities.  Does a function that mmaps file contents really belong in the same class as a function that resolves a symlink?  I don't think we need or even should have 1 class that is all things file system.  We should try to find ways to break it down into smaller, more targeted, more meaningful components.
> 

I don't think I agree with this.  For instance, when clang writes the dependent file records in debug information it writes them relative to the current compilation directory, so for complex compiles, on Unix you can end up with one source file that contains paths like:

/Foo/Project/subdirA/../headers/foo.h

and another:

/Foo/Project/subdirB/../headers/foo.h

If you want to do equivalence of these two headers (e.g. if somebody sets a breakpoint by full name) then I want to know "on the target platform, can these two files be the same file."  It's weird that I can't ask the file spec I was handed this question, it will give me an answer, but probably a wrong one.  Instead I have to pass the paths to some FileSystem call or even weirder some lower level llvm call that knows nothing about these files, and for sure is going to fail if they are remote...  The FileSpec has a chance to be able to answer this cause it was around from the time the reference was created and we can add info as needed to make this possible.  But watering it down to a string and then trying to recover extra information later on seems very error-prone.  And having to know which actor to ask this sort of question also seems error-prone.

Jim
  

> On Mon Feb 23 2015 at 1:23:54 PM <jingham at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Feb 23, 2015, at 1:17 PM, Zachary Turner <zturner at google.com> wrote:
> >
> > In http://reviews.llvm.org/D7836#128511, @jingham wrote:
> >
> >> That is not how we thought of FileSpec originally.  It clearly was meant to deal with real files (for instance it has Exists methods & Read, etc.)  It was meant to be a wrapper that would allow us to do all the useful file manipulation in a system-independent way.  It ended up with system dependencies just because we didn't have the time to keep it clean when there were no ports of lldb that weren't Unix...  But that's life, not design.
> >>
> >> Anyway, it would be weird to have some object you use to denote the files you are interested in, but then when you actually want to do something with them, you have to turn around and use another object.  And it would be unfortunate to have to write system specific code at this point except for the - hopefully very few - cases where the sort of thing we want to do to a file is not able to be expressed in a system-independent way.
> >>
> >> Jim
> >
> >
> > Well, already we have introduced the notion of the path syntax so that FileSpec can in theory refer to a path that is invalid for the host you're on.  In that case it doesn't make much sense to have a Windows path, for example on Mac, and then try to do a file system operation on it.  When I refactored some of Host months ago, there were other methods directly in Host that would do things like get file permissions, etc.  So there was already some separation between the FileSpec and the methods that hit the file system.  Most of that stuff ended up in FileSystem, and the stuff that remains in FileSpec is only there because I couldn't change the public API.
> >
> > But with the notion of a FileSpec that can refer to a path that can't possibly be on your local host, I think it makes sense to consider whether the file system access routines should be separated from FileSpec.
> 
> Not sure, wouldn't it be better to optionally attach a platform to FileSpec, so that FileSpecs can transparently handle remote access?  FileSpec's are how we specify files. Seems awkward to switch gears to something else when you actually want to access them.
> 
> Jim
> 
> 
> >
> >
> > http://reviews.llvm.org/D7836
> >
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