On Thu, 2008-08-14 at 12:22 -0700, Jason Dagit wrote:
Can you suggest anything? Currently --help says:
--enable-library-vanilla Enable Vanilla libraries --disable-library-vanilla Disable Vanilla libraries -p --enable-library-profiling Enable Library profiling --disable-library-profiling Disable Library profiling
I was thinking something that makes mention that you get twice as much stuff.
-p --enable-library-profiling Enable Library profiling and implies Vanilla libraries
Ah, but it doesn't. Each option is independent. You can build only profiling if you --enable-library-profiling --disable-library-vanilla
It seems very nit-picky to comment on the usage of vanilla, because really that that idiom should be widely understood, but I do it below anyway :) So I assume vanilla is mostly used to contrast with profiling. I'm sort of assuming you can get _only_ the profiling library if you use -p --disable-library-vanilla.
Right, exactly. Yeah, I'm not so sure about "vanilla", perhaps "ordinary" or some other word would be better.
Perhaps, "implies" should be "also enables" or "in addition to".
I recall reading a research paper once about picking terms when designing command sets that reaffirms the intuition of making sure your commands are distinct opposites. An example in the paper was that when designing a command set for giving directions you wouldn't pick "Left" and "Turn", you'd pick "Left" and "Right" because people remember opposites more easily. Maybe that gives us a reason to not use vanilla, or even standard/regular. I have a hard time finding antonyms for profile or instrumented (I tried some other word forms there off, still with no luck). In that case I might prefer to see "standard" instead of vanilla.
So what should we use, given the semantics we have (which I think is the right semantics). In future we may well also gain other 'ways' of building a library/executable. Other kinds of profiling, vectorisation etc. We want to be able to enable/disable any combination of these. Duncan