Re: improving testing scheme (was Re: ACATS and GCC testsuite)

[Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>]

On Sat, 2003-03-29 at 00:25, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> Laurent Guerby said:
> >That's why I by far prefer to have the testing being done
> >after install, and not in build like it is done for GCC
> >via DejaGNU now. It looks like I have no chance
> >of changing this sad state of affair, but well I
> >can still make a separate package for Ada.
> 
> A lot of people mentioned the justification "You want to test it before 
> you install it, don't you?".

Well I'm probably stupid, but it makes no sense to me, what's magic
about installing? You install somewhere, put in PATH, play if it,
if it doesn't please you, you change your PATH, if you're short on space
you delete the install location. 100% reliable, safe and feel good
transaction semantics, and you're exactly in user situation with
no fragile hypothesis about release time.

> However, we would certainly like to make the in-build testing situation 
> a lot closer to the post-install testing situation by eliminating the 
> many curious flags which currently need to be passed to the tested 
> programs.  This is one of the motivations behind Per Bothner's "new 
> build scheme", which I'm still working on, albeit slowly.

Looks like overly complicated to my small brain, which
has just given up on the idea of doing anything with
the current in build Makefile mess and DejaGNU.

-- 
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>