How polished do tools need to be?

[Stuart Marks]

On 6/26/13 6:54 PM, Jonathan Gibbons wrote:
> On 06/22/2013 09:43 AM, Alan Bateman wrote:
>> friday-stats is a great idea!!
>>
>> So I'm curious how "polished" tools need to be? The initial tools that Jon
>> pushed are really nice, ready to use with any CI system.
>>
>> I have a several scripts that that I use to get interesting data and I'm
>> wondering whether to clean them up. For example, I have a script that runs
>> over the jtreg work directory to get print out the 50 slowest tests (I'm
>> pretty sure Jon has a script for that one). Another one is a script that
>> summarizes the ProblemList.txt to give the count of excluded tests by
>> platform. Some of these might be too trivial but I find them useful.
>
> I've pushed Stuart's "classvers" script as an example of a neat and useful
> script. Even though I've now published my "oak" tree" for Stuart's "little
> acorn", I still think it is worth publishing little acorns because they may
> often be more easily hackable into the beginning of the next great utility.

Thanks Jon!

My take on the amount of polish that's necessary is, not much. The basic 
function should be there, but it's probably better to get stuff in early and 
then continue to fix it up. The alternative is to hold back until stuff is 
"done" and, as you know, software is never really done.

Speaking of which, now that my script is in, it needs to be fixed up a bit. It 
needs a usage/help message, and it shouldn't default to searching "." but 
instead it should take directories as args. I'll post a diff for that at some 
point.

s'marks