[TUHS] Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[TUHS] Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[Marcus Clark]

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Wikipedia has a brief page on cscope, which has a link  to
https://cscope.sourceforge.net/history.html
written by Harold Bamford, in which he talks about the
early days of cscope at Bell Labs and its inventor Joe Steffan.

I wondered if anyone can add any interesting information about using
cscope on their projects or anything about its development.

-Marcus.

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[TUHS] Re: Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[Larry McVoy]

Interesting, no.  Fond memories, absolutely.  On SPARC machines with 4MB
of ram, cscope was pretty essential if you wanted to get anything done.
I used it a ton, made me way more productive.

On Thu, Apr 04, 2024 at 09:16:31PM +0000, Marcus Clark wrote:
> 
> Wikipedia has a brief page on cscope, which has a link  to
> https://cscope.sourceforge.net/history.html
> written by Harold Bamford, in which he talks about the
> early days of cscope at Bell Labs and its inventor Joe Steffan.
> 
> I wondered if anyone can add any interesting information about using
> cscope on their projects or anything about its development.
> 
> -Marcus.

-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[Dan Cross]

On Thu, Apr 4, 2024 at 6:38 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> Interesting, no.  Fond memories, absolutely.  On SPARC machines with 4MB
> of ram, cscope was pretty essential if you wanted to get anything done.
> I used it a ton, made me way more productive.

That aspect of the culture remained and carried on to the descendents of Sun.
cscope is still very much used in the illumos project. In fact, I used
it yesterday (though not for illumos).

        - Dan C.


> On Thu, Apr 04, 2024 at 09:16:31PM +0000, Marcus Clark wrote:
> >
> > Wikipedia has a brief page on cscope, which has a link  to
> > https://cscope.sourceforge.net/history.html
> > written by Harold Bamford, in which he talks about the
> > early days of cscope at Bell Labs and its inventor Joe Steffan.
> >
> > I wondered if anyone can add any interesting information about using
> > cscope on their projects or anything about its development.
> >
> > -Marcus.
>
> --
> ---
> Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Thursday,  4 April 2024 at 15:38:28 -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 04, 2024 at 09:16:31PM +0000, Marcus Clark wrote:
>>
>> I wondered if anyone can add any interesting information about using
>> cscope on their projects or anything about its development.
>
> Interesting, no.  Fond memories, absolutely.  On SPARC machines with 4MB
> of ram, cscope was pretty essential if you wanted to get anything done.
> I used it a ton, made me way more productive.

Agreed.  It was an essential tool when I was developing code.  It just
seems funny to be asked about "memories" or "interesting".  At an only
slightly different level, it would be like asking the same question
about, say, sh.

Greg
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[TUHS] Re: Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 5 Apr 2024, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> Agreed.  It was an essential tool when I was developing code.  It just 
> seems funny to be asked about "memories" or "interesting".  At an only 
> slightly different level, it would be like asking the same question 
> about, say, sh.

Using C since the 70s (5/6/7/CP-M/SysIII/SysV/FreeBSD/Linux/Mac/etc), and 
I've never heard of it?

Now installed on the Mac to see what it can do...

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Apr 05, 2024 at 12:37:22PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Apr 2024, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> 
> > Agreed.  It was an essential tool when I was developing code.  It just 
> > seems funny to be asked about "memories" or "interesting".  At an only 
> > slightly different level, it would be like asking the same question 
> > about, say, sh.
> 
> Using C since the 70s (5/6/7/CP-M/SysIII/SysV/FreeBSD/Linux/Mac/etc), and 
> I've never heard of it?
> 
> Now installed on the Mac to see what it can do...

It knows everything and lets you see that fast.  make cscope was a thing
in my makefiles for decades.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat

[TUHS] Re: Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

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On Thursday,  4 April 2024 at 19:07:34 -0700, Larry McVoy wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 05, 2024 at 12:37:22PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
>> On Fri, 5 Apr 2024, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
>>
>>> Agreed.  It was an essential tool when I was developing code.  It just
>>> seems funny to be asked about "memories" or "interesting".  At an only
>>> slightly different level, it would be like asking the same question
>>> about, say, sh.
>>
>> Using C since the 70s (5/6/7/CP-M/SysIII/SysV/FreeBSD/Linux/Mac/etc), and
>> I've never heard of it?
>>
>> Now installed on the Mac to see what it can do...
>
> It knows everything and lets you see that fast.  make cscope was a thing
> in my makefiles for decades.

Indeed.  The main FreeBSD kernel Makefile also includes a cscope
target, and also TAGS (for Emacs), which is similar.

Greg
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[TUHS] Re: Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[G. Branden Robinson]

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At 2024-04-05T14:54:50+1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> Indeed.  The main FreeBSD kernel Makefile also includes a cscope
> target, and also TAGS (for Emacs), which is similar.

ctags(1) is not only supported by nvi, elvis, vim, and vile, it (and the
ex(1) and vi(1) interface to it) is standardized by POSIX.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/ctags.html

cscope is cool, but its use only of standout() for variation of the
display is visually tiring, and after being away from it for a while, I
always forget that you have to use Control+D to exit.

Regards,
Branden

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[TUHS] Re: Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[Dave Horsfall]

On Fri, 5 Apr 2024, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:

> > It knows everything and lets you see that fast.  make cscope was a 
> > thing in my makefiles for decades.
> 
> Indeed.  The main FreeBSD kernel Makefile also includes a cscope target, 
> and also TAGS (for Emacs), which is similar.

OK, I'm convinced; it looks pretty neat.

Thanks, all.

-- Dave

[TUHS] Re: Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[Noel Hunt]

And don't forget that 'samuel' had an interface to 'cscope'.

The drawback to that is that 'samuel' tries to put cscope's output onto a
cacscaded button 3 menu, and when you have a large number of resuslts
this unfortunately becomes unwieldly. Samuel is extremely nice to use
when you aren't dealing with hundreds of results from a search.

By modifying cscope's output such that the filename/linenumber information
is in a saner format (i.e., 'filename:linenumber'), and is the first
field of the
output line, then it is possible to use cscope with Plan9-style plumbing (sam,
acme) by availing oneself of the line-oriented output format. This could, for
example, be read into an acme window.


On Fri, Apr 5, 2024 at 8:16 AM Marcus Clark <marcus.e.clark@outlook.com> wrote:
>
>
> Wikipedia has a brief page on cscope, which has a link  to
> https://cscope.sourceforge.net/history.html
> written by Harold Bamford, in which he talks about the
> early days of cscope at Bell Labs and its inventor Joe Steffan.
>
> I wondered if anyone can add any interesting information about using
> cscope on their projects or anything about its development.
>
> -Marcus.

[TUHS] Re: Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Noel,

> And don't forget that 'samuel' had an interface to 'cscope'.

I've used cscope.  What's samuel?

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.

[TUHS] Re: Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[Noel Hunt]

'Samuel' is Rob Pike's 'sam' with some additions, those being the ability
to run 'cin' (C interpreter) on selected text, an 'advisor', which would
print the data type definition of selected text, and the 'browser', which
was an interface to cfront. Invoking 'browser' would fork a cscope
process running in line-oriented mode, and on button 3 were the
various search items that you will see in the normal cscope interface,
somewhat abbreviated. So you could select a piece of text, a name
of a function say, select 'calls to this function', and the results would
be added to the button 3 menu; selecting one of these takes you to
the file and line number in the cscope output.

There is one further addition, 'smudge'. It allows you to put a mark on
a place in a text file and assign an arbitrary name to it; these marks
then appear on a cascaded button 3 menu---select a mark, return to
that piece of text.

On Fri, Apr 5, 2024 at 9:11 PM Ralph Corderoy <ralph@inputplus.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi Noel,
>
> > And don't forget that 'samuel' had an interface to 'cscope'.
>
> I've used cscope.  What's samuel?
>
> --
> Cheers, Ralph.

[TUHS] Re: Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[Brad Spencer]

Marcus Clark <marcus.e.clark@outlook.com> writes:

> Wikipedia has a brief page on cscope, which has a link  to
> https://cscope.sourceforge.net/history.html
> written by Harold Bamford, in which he talks about the
> early days of cscope at Bell Labs and its inventor Joe Steffan.
>
> I wondered if anyone can add any interesting information about using
> cscope on their projects or anything about its development.
>
> -Marcus.


A long time ago on the project I was on when I was at AT&T / Lucent, the
department I was in had a wrapper shell script around cscope.  We used
this wrapper to query the source of the product that we worked on.  The
source, at the time, was huge and cscope was about the only thing around
that let you search the source with the least amount of pain.  The
wrapper script simply invoked cscope in a safe way that kept it from
accidently re-indexing the source code when the developer didn't mean to
do that.  We did re-indexes in a cron job every once in a while.

Since the source to cscope is available now, it has made it into pkgsrc
and I use it on the NetBSD source tree all of the time.




-- 
Brad Spencer - brad@anduin.eldar.org - KC8VKS - http://anduin.eldar.org

[TUHS] Re: Does anyone have any memories of using cscope that they care to share?

[Kevin Bowling]

On Thu, Apr 4, 2024 at 2:16 PM Marcus Clark <marcus.e.clark@outlook.com> wrote:
>
>
> Wikipedia has a brief page on cscope, which has a link  to
> https://cscope.sourceforge.net/history.html
> written by Harold Bamford, in which he talks about the
> early days of cscope at Bell Labs and its inventor Joe Steffan.
>
> I wondered if anyone can add any interesting information about using
> cscope on their projects or anything about its development.

I used it a bit when coming up with FreeBSD kernel development 8 or so
years ago.  These days I just tend to use 'ripgrep' which has been a
game changer for me when working across the repo sprawls of a
corporation.. having outrageous speed and not having to maintain an
index is really the winning ticket for my millennial brain.

> -Marcus.