[llvm-dev] [RFC] llvm-dwarfdump's command line interface

[David Blaikie via llvm-dev]

On Fri, Sep 8, 2017 at 2:25 PM Adrian Prantl <aprantl at apple.com> wrote:

> I would like to grow llvm-dwarfdump to become a drop-in replacement for
> the dwarfdump utility that is currently shipping on Darwin. (You can search
> the web for "darwin dwarfdump manpage" to see the currently supported
> feature set.)


For anyone looking: http://www.manpagez.com/man/1/dwarfdump/


> Doing this means implementing the missing features, such as the ability to
> print only subsets of DIEs, looking up DIEs by name or address, and the
> option to produce more diff-friendly output. I'm fairly certain that these
> additional features will be beneficial on all LLVM-suported platforms.
> To turn it into a drop-in replacement on Darwin, I will also need to
> re-orgnize the command line interface a bit. In particular (and this is
> pretty much the only difference)
>
> $ llvm-dwarfdump --debug-dump=info
> $ llvm-dwarfdump --debug-dump=apple-objc
>
> becomes
>
> $ dwarfdump --debug-info
> $ dwarfdump --apple-objc
>
> respectively.
> My question is, how attached are users on other platforms to the current
> command line interface?


I'm not especially attached - though I imagine it's pretty cheap to support
both (though I don't personally mind if you want to migrate from one to the
other - will just take a bit to relearn the muscle memory).

One other thing: If we're moving towards a point where llvm-dwarfdump is
not just a tool for LLVM developers but a shipping product, might be worth
being a bit more rigorous about testing for it (historically sometimes
dwarfdump functionality hasn't been tested - committed along with the LLVM
functionality it was implemented to test - or the only testing is with
checked in object files, which are a bit hard to maintain). Either looking
at the DWARF YAML support and maybe fleshing it out a bit/making it more
usable, or maybe assembly based tests? Not sure.


> I could easily create a separate command line parser for Darwin that
> mimicks Darwin dwarfdump (like llvm-objdump does), or we could just change
> the command line interface for llvm-dwarfdump. I know that there is also a
> dwarfdump utility on Linux (based on libdwarf?) that has an entirely
> different command line interface from both llvm-dwarfdump and Darwin
> dwarfdump.
> Do people see value in keeping the llvm-dwarfdump command line interface
> or would changing it to the above format be acceptable?
>
> thanks for your input!
> Adrian
>
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