Re: egcs testsuite & dejagnu : A special case?

[Manfred Hollstein <manfred@s-direktnet.de>]

On Thu, 25 June 1998, 17:27:34, carlo@runaway.xs4all.nl wrote:

 > Hey all, I love working in this team :).
 > Quite a change from the seven years I worked
 > on the undernet ircd project: Here there are
 > actually others that do something too! :)
 > 
 > But back to serious work:
 > 
 > ----
 > 
 > My self-assigned task of checking how well
 > the egcs testsuite works with dejagnu has
 > lead to a the following conclusion on which
 > I'd like to get some feedback from you:
 > 
 > The latest dejagnu (980528) did address the
 > problem that was temporally fixed with the
 > lookfor_dir_with_trigger.patch (to be applied
 > to dejagnu-971222 only thus).
 > 
 > However, as already reported by H.J. Lu,
 > dejagnu-980528 is broken again (even with
 > the lookfor_dir_with_trigger.patch because
 > something else is broken now).
 > 
 > I investigated this new problem and found that
 > it basically is the result of the fact that
 > dejagnu is written to test other packages,
 > other packages that need a compiler to be
 > compiled, but that definitely are not the
 > compiler itself.
 > 
 > The problem, when needing the package itself
 > to compile the package (testsuite executables),
 > has not been addressed in dejagnu.
 > 
 > My feeling is that this is not really a problem
 > of dejagnu: We can't expect them to hardcode
 > support for all the compiler cases into dejagnu,
 > not unless there is a simple solution that makes
 > egcs take care of this "special handling".
 > For example, dejagnu sets $gccpath to the path
 > of the installed compiler.  I think it is the
 > responsibility of egcs to explicitly make sure
 > that it is set to the correct directory of the
 > package being tested (egcs); and not the
 > responsibility of dejagnu to detect it is now
 > testing a compiler package.
 > 
 > I am more then willing to write the small changes
 > for egcs to make it work smoothly, but I'd like
 > to hear a "go" from you before I do :).
 > These patches will be logical, but only if you
 > accept the idea that testing a package that is
 > a compiler is a special case.
 > 
 > Comments please?

I'd really like the idea, to have _one_ version of dejagnu which can
be used (hopefully) on all platforms. Sometimes in the past I've seen
different test results from different people testing the same compiler 
snapshot. I've even recognized this myself on my Motorola platforms:
the same compiler snapshot produced different failure reports with
dejagnu-971028 and dejagnu-971222.

Yes, each package someone wants to check, should make provisions for
everything behaving different than other packages.

If we can get these testsuite related issues fixed, we'll be able to
compare results people are reporting on a much more accurate basis.

 > 
 > Carlo Wood
 > 
 > carlo@runaway.xs4all.nl
 > 

manfred