installing & testing gengtype?

installing & testing gengtype?

[Basile Starynkevitch]

Hello All,

References:
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-11/msg02562.html
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-11/msg02565.html

As you know, gengtype is becoming a user visible program [it is needed
to people coding GCC plugins which uses GTY], probably to be installed
in the same directory as cc1 (this is what Alexander Oliva told me at
last GCC summit).

So it should be installed there.

And the gtype.state file should also be installed somewhere. It is an
internal textual file which summarizes all the information gotten by
gengtype when parsing all GCC GTY-ing headers. This state file is
required for generating gt-plugin.h files by gengtype from a user
plugin.c (etc...).

I am not familiar enough with GCC build system (this part of GCC still
scares me a lot), and even with the help I've gotten so far, I am not
able to do that alone. I suspect the gcc/Makefile.in changes are tiny
(perhaps less than a dozen lines), but I cannot guess them reliably
(notably because I am not familiar enough with the build vs host vs
target installations). From what I understood eg in
http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2010-11/msg02571.html gengtype might
need to be compiled twice, once in build mode and once in host mode,
but I don't understand the details.

Likewise, I believe we should have tests of gengtype, at least in
plugin mode. While I could "specify" them (e.g. saying that with such
testinput.c file gengtype should generate such gt-testinput.h file with
such and such regexp patterns) I am not familiar enough with dejagnu to
implement any kind og such things. Again, I would imagine that for
dejagnu knowing people, it is almost trivial. Once a dejagnu test
infrastructure is provided, coding test cases is simple. And it very
probably will be useful for the required extensions of gengtype (like
supporting C++ GTY-ed classes).

Could anyone please help, either by a *detailed* explanation or by a
simple patch (I would imagine that doing the patch is simpler than
explaining things...)

It would be sad if gengtype won't be installed in the 4.6 release? Or
should I open a PR about that?

Cheers.

-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
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