egcs testsuite & dejagnu : A special case?

[Carlo Wood <carlo@runaway.xs4all.nl>]

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?

Carlo Wood

carlo@runaway.xs4all.nl