[Scummvm-devel] Evolution of Scummvm-tools

[Lars Skovlund]

Hi

As you may remember, the "toolability" was a big point of disagreement
for me when FreeSCI was merged in many years ago. FreeSCI included a
great number of tools, and I had a habit of writing new ones for
investigative purposes and for debugging (and for university...). So,
as a matter of principle, I am in favor of anything that increases the
toolability of ScummVM.

Moving stuff into mainline may superficially seem like a good way to
achieve this. But I agree with the points that LordHoto and Einar
Johan make: The reason why toolability suffers in the first place is
the massive dependency on backend code in Common:: - file system
support being a perfect example; for tools, we want the same APIs, but
when they want to open a file, that is what we should give them.

Therefore, in any case two different versions of Common:: seems
preferable. Trying to keep them together would only complicate
further development, so I think my vote would go to keeping -tools
separate. 

My 2 cents

Lars