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Re: [tracecompass-dev] Trace Compass command-line interface
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Hi Bernd,
Looks great, and quite interesting!
Imo I think long options should always use double dashes (--), unlike
what java and mvn do...
One question though, what is the end goal of this interface? Is it only
to launch Trace Compass with a given context (trace, time range, etc)?
Or to eventually *control* a running instance of Trace Compass?
If it's only the former, then fine, "./tracecompass --cli etc." should
cover everything.
However if it's the latter, then it's a totally different beast. That
would imply a separate daemon running, which would be completely
separate program. That program wouldn't even have to be in Java
(although having it in Java too could make distribution easier). You
would have much more liberty in how that is implemented, since there
would be no Eclipse options in the way. It could even be built and/or
packaged separately.
One example of a similar program I know is "nmcli", to control Network
Manager from the command line. The "main" program is the icon in the
toolbar, but the nmcli tool offers a different way of doing the same
actions that are accessible from the UI.
But then again, it depends on what you what this interface to be able to do.
Cheers,
Alex
On 2016-02-04 11:17 AM, Bernd Hufmann wrote:
Hello
Trace Compass team would like to add some more command-line options to
the Trace Compass RCP to allow users to open traces, run analyses,
create experiments, seek to specific time ranges and more from the
command-line.
For that, I did an investigation about Java libraries for command line
parsing that could be used for Trace Compass. I found multiple
libraries on the web that are available for that. I had then a closer
look at Apache Commons CLI [1] because it is available in Eclipse
orbit and it would be straight forward to add this dependency to Trace
Compass. Right now version 1.2 is part of the orbit current release.
It supports different type of command-line options (taken from [1])
* POSIX like options (ie. tar -zxvf foo.tar.gz)
* GNU like long options (ie. du --human-readable --max-depth=1)
* Java like properties (ie. java -Djava.awt.headless=true
-Djava.net.useSystemProxies=true Foo)
* Short options with value attached (ie. gcc -O2 foo.c)
* long options with single hyphen (ie. ant -projecthelp)
What it doesn't seem to support is a git-like command-line interface
with a main command (e.g. git) and sub-commands (e.g. rebase) where
the main and each sub-command could have set of options themselves. If
we'd like to got that route, then some more investigation is need for
that. Worst case scenario, would be that we need to implement our own
custom CLI parser.
I experimented a bit with the API and created a prototype for that
(see patch [2]). It was straight forward to use it. I added some
example options and also re-implemented the existing "--open
path-to-trace" command-line.
If you'd like to try it out use for example: "./tracecompass --cli
--help", "./tracecompass --cli --open path-to-trace" or
"./tracecompass --cli --open path-to-trace --zoom "11:24:49.550 094
360,11:24:49.649 408 317" ". Note --cli is used to easily filter out
any Eclipse related options passed on.
What needs to be done next:
* Propose and agree on command-line syntax. For that it would be good
to look at good examples of tools with command-line interfaces.
* Choose the right java command-line parser library or/and implement
our own (if needed).
* Update the current command-line (to the new library)
* Incrementally implement the handlers for different options
One note, the main use case of the command-line should be very
straight-forward for the user.
Comments are welcome.
Best Regards
Bernd
[1] https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-cli/index.html
[2] https://git.eclipse.org/r/#/c/65906
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