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Re: egcs testsuite & dejagnu : A special case?
- To: carlo at runaway dot xs4all dot nl, egcs at cygnus dot com
- Subject: Re: egcs testsuite & dejagnu : A special case?
- From: mrs at wrs dot com (Mike Stump)
- Date: Mon, 29 Jun 1998 16:00:15 -0700
- Cc: law at cygnus dot com
> From: Carlo Wood <carlo@runaway.xs4all.nl>
> Date: Thu, 25 Jun 1998 17:27:34 +0200 (CEST)
> 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.
Could you rephrase this?
If you meant to say that dejagnu is not written to test the compiler
itself, then I wonder why you say that, as it was.
> The problem, when needing the package itself to compile the package
> (testsuite executables), has not been addressed in dejagnu.
Could you rephrase this?
If you meant to say that dejagnu doesn't address the problem of
testing executables in egcs that are built with the compiler in egcs,
then I wonder why you say that, as it was.
> My feeling is that this is not really a problem of dejagnu: We can't
> expect them
That them is us. dejagnu exists to test the compiler. That is why it
was written, and that is it's main purpose in life.
> to hardcode support for all the compiler cases into dejagnu,
We all agree here. Cleanliness says that we should use generic
interfaces with as little built in knowledge of the compiler specifics
as we can. dejagnu however is not exactly a model of cleanliness.
> 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.
If your changes make it work more often and don't introduce bugs, then
I'd support them. The problem is the later one. If you massively
rearchitect dejagnu and unless you test in many different ways on many
different targets, or are really good, there will be bugs. What is
painful, is if you break testing that does work today. This is why, I
think when it comes to dejagnu, I don't like to see a whole lot of
code motion in it, just a little bit every now and then to fix
specific problems in specific ways.