Re: Add script to build many glibc configurations

[Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com>]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2016 at 12:51 PM, Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Nov 2016, Zack Weinberg wrote:
>> On 11/09/2016 11:27 AM, Joseph Myers wrote:
>> > This patch adds a Python (3.5 or later) script to build many different
>> > configurations of glibc ...
>>
>> Since this does its own glibc checkout, it's not clear to me how one
>> should use it to test a patch(set)...
>
> You patch the script's glibc checkout (or switch it to a different branch,
> or whatever) at some point after the checkout step and before running the
> "glibcs" build...

Thanks, I have it working now.  I'd like to mention some more places
where the script could be more ergonomic for patch testing:

* Please don't delete the build tree unless configure, build, and
check all succeed, so that one can dig into a failure beyond what's
visible in the logs.  Add an option to preserve the build tree even if
all three succeeded, to facilitate additional testing (for instance,
an "installed stripped libraries are unchanged" test - if that fails
one will want to go look at the object files).
* Please find some way of not needing to make a copy of the glibc
source tree for each build configuration, so that one can make edits
to .../src/glibc and immediately do incremental rebuilds in all
failing configurations.
* Please make sure that command lines written to logfiles are properly
quoted, so that they can be copied and pasted directly into a shell.
(The problem case I know about is CC="x-y-z-gcc -mthis -mthat" on a
configure command line, which currently gets written to the logfile
without any quotes.)  (Python stdlib has a function `shlex.quote` that
will help.)

I'm kibitzing a lot, so let me say that this script is really, really
useful and I can see lots of cases where it will make complex changes
easier to validate.  Thanks for writing it.

zw