Re: [testsuite, build] Convert boehm-gc testsuite to DejaGnu (PR boehm-gc/11412)

[Mike Stump <mikestump@comcast.net>]

On Jan 5, 2011, at 10:06 AM, Rainer Orth wrote:
>  I see lots of opportunities for code reuse here: most DejaGnu tools in
>  GCC started off as a copy of some other tool with search-and-replace
>  of the tool name and only a few (if any) local changes.  This is a
>  total mess to understand and maintain and I hope to do something about
>  this in the future.

:-)  You now can, though, bear in mind, once you have a delegation neuron, and multiple inheritance neurons (ok, stop laughing at me)...  the design of dejagnu is slightly cleaner than at first blush.

If you've ever seen it wired up to telnet to a terminal server to connect to the serial console on a PC running dos, controled from a real unix machine, to test an entire toolchain (compiler, gdb and so on), you can start to gain some appreciation.  Though, I admit, if you only ever do native testing, the thing is hard to read, convoluted and mysterious.  If someone know of a good programming methodology to allow for the complexity, but hide it for most people, love to have a pointer...  I'd love such a system.

If you ever seen that, and the PC talking to a mips target, and seen it test 5 boards at once, it is sweet.