Re: [PATCH 22/27] perf tools: Enable --children option by default

[Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>]

Hi,

On 2014-07-29 15:52:46 +0900, Namhyung Kim wrote:
> On Mon, 28 Jul 2014 21:23:26 +0200, Andres Freund wrote:
> > On 2014-05-29 12:58:25 +0900, Namhyung Kim wrote:
> >> Now perf top and perf report will show children column by default if
> >> it has callchain information.
> >> 
> >> Requested-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
> >> Tested-by: Rodrigo Campos <rodrigo@sdfg.com.ar>
> >> Tested-by: Arun Sharma <asharma@fb.com>
> >> Acked-by: Jiri Olsa <jolsa@redhat.com>
> >> Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
> >> Signed-off-by: Namhyung Kim <namhyung@kernel.org>
> >
> > Stupid question: Why? This breaks user's usage pattern in a rather
> > significant way because the new output is pretty much entirely useless
> > in many cases, especially for userland programs. I think the new option
> > is great, but why is it suddenly the default?
> 
> Yes, I knew it'd annoy some existing users like you :)  But I hoped it'd
> be useful for new and (at least, some of) old users to see children/
> cumulative overheads by default.  If it lies under an option, it
> wouldn't have a chance to be used by normal users who simply run perf
> record and report most of time.

By that argument every new feature would need to be enabled by
default. Which normally isn't what happens.

> If you think it's entirely useless for you cases, you can set it to off
> using ~/.perfconfig file:
> 
>   [report]
>   children = false

Already done that ;).

The problem is still that I can't use --no-children on older systems, so
I can't write benchmarking scripts anymore that don't take depend on the
perf version...

I guess it's too late to argue effectively though :)

Greetings,

Andres Freund