Re: [boost] [Core] gdb/VS Pretty-printers for Boost

On 2020-07-17 21:48, Jeff Trull via Boost wrote:

On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 10:11 AM Jeff Garland wrote:

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Maybe we could encourage the author to bring it to us as a 'tool' -- I don't know that we need a review for that even. Regardless, I wasn't aware of these -- cool!

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What concerns me about this approach is that the pretty-printers will quickly drift out of sync with the libraries themselves. In fact it has already happened - if you look at Rüdiger's repo you can see he had to incorporate a versioning scheme, as well as unit tests, to ensure the code stayed correct (one of the features I really like about his work). Some method where individual libraries produced visualizers that were combined at install time would be ideal, as they would be owned by each maintainer.

I can tell that putting the responsibility of keeping the pretty printers actual on the library maintainer will not necessarily improve the situation. Especially not if the library maintainer is not familiar with the pretty printers know-how.