Relay trace indenting?

[Gregory M. Turner]

On Sunday 02 March 2003 05:57 pm, Duane Clark wrote:
> Just wondering if anyone has written a script or something that does
> indenting of relay traces. I don't know how other people handle these,
> but I find that I invariably spend a lot of time indenting the calls in
> relay trace files to make them easier to follow. It would seem like
> something that someone would already have an automated method of
> handling (or maybe I'm the only one that does this).

I've never seen such a thing but it would be really cool if it existed.

The hard, but really, really, really cool thing, I reckon, would be if we were 
able to "automagically" indent them (presumably this is what you are looking 
for anyhow).  I imagine, if we took a "snapshot" of the stack on each 
debugmsg, and compared it against the stack the next time a debugmsg was 
issued, we could do it some, but not all of the time.  API's that are just 
internal "workhorse" API's can just always indent their debugmsg's; I tried 
this for a while in the rpc code but found it was pretty difficult to 
maintain that way, and, when it broke, disproportionately confusing to 
fix.... so I reverted those in a subsequent patch.  It is probably dangerous 
to go crawling around following stack pointers every time a debugmsg is 
issued, but maybe some careful exception handling code could handle the 
fallout.

Of course, the performance hit would be disgusting... And compiler inlining 
would break it... I guess it's probably more trouble than its worth...   
unless someone knows of a better way?  Could API snooping be re-jiggered, 
somehow, to increment some static, thread-local integer on each call, and 
decerement it on each return, for example?  

-- 
gmt