Unify ctools and cscripts

Added by Mayer Michael over 8 years ago

From a user perspective, it shouldn't really matter wether an analysis tool is a ctool or a cscript. From command line or from python, these tools behave exactly the same and there is no reason to expose the programming language via the prefix to the user. Accordingly, I believe we could think about simply unifying the two.
The change would include:

rename all cscripts to ct....
get all scripts and tools when using import ctools in Python.

I can’t really foresee what would be the impact and effort of such a change regarding the build system and other parts of the software. Therefore, I opened up this forum entry for discussion. I just believe from a user perspective, the reason why some tools start with ct... and some with cs... might seem confusing it he long run.

Of course, I know that cscripts usually internally use some ctools for their analysis tasks which probably makes the simultaneous import more difficult.

Any opinions, ideas?

Replies (2)

RE: Unify ctools and cscripts - Added by Knödlseder Jürgen over 8 years ago

What are the main drivers behind your proposal? Have you encountered problems with having the two variants of tools?

Btw: there are small differences between ctools and cscripts which come for example from differences on how CTRL-C is handled in binaries and Python. The error messages are also a bit different.

RE: Unify ctools and cscripts - Added by Mayer Michael over 8 years ago

What are the main drivers behind your proposal? Have you encountered problems with having the two variants of tools?

No not at all. The main driver is the usability from a user perspective. I have received the question why some tools start with cs..., some with ct... and just when applying and using the tools the user doesn’t have to know the programming language behind it. Especially from Python, the user currently has to know if you need to do import cscripts. Intuitively one would expect from import ctools to have all ctools functionality available.

Btw: there are small differences between ctools and cscripts which come for example from differences on how CTRL-C is handled in binaries and Python. The error messages are also a bit different.

I agree they behave differently regarding CTRL+C and also how exceptions are raised. Probably the reason for two different types of tools has to be made more clear in the user documentation?
I am not in favour of one or the other way. I just wanted to bring it up here in order to have a discussion platform and to gather some opinions about it.

(1-2/2)