Running gcc testsuite outside of gcc's sourcetree.

[Nicolas Noble <pixel.nobis@gmail.com>]

Hello,

  Long story short, I'm looking for a way to test a distribution's
compiler by running the latest gcc testsuite on it, but so far, I've
only seem to run it on the same gcc sourcetree it's on. I actually
wonder if it's possible and/or relevant to do this on the
distribution's compiler.

  My problem resides in RedHat's gcc (which version seems to be gcc
(GCC) 4.1.2 20071124 (Red Hat 4.1.2-42)). I recently discovered that
this compiler hosts a bunch of known gcc bugs that have been reported
and fixed in the gcc mainstream, but it seems the bugfixes never got
ported back in RedHat's.

  Now only one of these bugs bit me, and bit me hard, and that's how I
discovered the whole thing. I manually ran a bunch of the testcases in
the gcc testsuite, and I already found 15 bugs active there. But
running of all them by hand is difficult and painful, but I don't see
how to do that automatically on the system's compiler from the
testsuite's documentation. My ultimate goal is to evaluate to which
extend I can trust this compiler, and use these results to convince my
management that we're most probably going to face a lot more trouble
if we continue using a compiler that's containing known bugs.

  Is it possible to run the testsuite on the system's compiler ? I've
seen that some of the testcases might not be relevant as they're
trying to check some of gcc's new features that might not be in that
old version. Or would there be another, simpler testsuite I could run
natively ?

  Thanks!

  -- Nicolas Noble