Re: Documentation? Anywhere?

[Josh Triplett <josht@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On Tue, 2008-07-22 at 17:31 +0000, Ben Greenberg wrote:
> So, I'm new to Linux and to static analysis and so I'm sure I'm not the target
> audience for Sparse, but where is all the documentation? The website is
> well...sparse, the readme contains nothing helpful and neither does the FAQ. I
> compiled Sparse but I have no idea how to use it. There are all these binaries
> and none of them accept --help (except for test-suite). Am I missing something?

sparse and cgcc have manpages.  Other than that, you haven't missed
anything.

> Basically I'm trying to use Sparse to generate a call graph for a specific
> program. I tried using the graph binary which seems to generate XML-like code
> but my browser can't read it. Through browsing this message list I found that
> people were piping the results of graph through the binaries in the gvpr folder
> First of all, how am I supposed to have deduced that the output of graph needs
> to be further processed and that the binaries in gvpr are there for that
> purpose? Second, when I tried to do that I got an error saying that
> /usr/bin/gvpr doesn't exist. Do I need to move the gvpr folder to /usr/bin/ or
> is gvpr a separate program? My command is: ./graph flow.c | ./gvpr/return-paths

graph does not generate XML.  It generates graphviz output.  You need
graphviz to work with it; graphviz also includes gvpr.  You do not need
to process the output further; you simply have the option of doing so.
You can directly feed the output of graph to "dot" or one of the other
graphviz tools to get an image.

However, I agree that no obvious connection exists between the "graph"
program and the post-processing scripts in gvpr.

- Josh Triplett