Re: announce: egcs benchmark suite, alpha release

[Marc Lehmann <pcg at goof dot com>]

On Sun, Jan 17, 1999 at 03:31:54PM -0700, Jeffrey A Law wrote:
> 
>   In message <rzqd84ert0w.fsf@djlvig.dl.ac.uk>you write:
>   > Do the copyright problems for the testsuite apply to this too?  There
>   > are some Fortranesque things we could add, but at least one of was a

At the moment, we have only linpack.f. Contributions are welcome ;) I had to
write a c-wrapper for linpack since I'm fortran illiterate and didn't know
how to interface the c functions properly ;)

>   > candidate of mine the testsuite.
> Not at the current time since we are not planning on distributing the
> benchmarks as part of the compiler.
> 
> However, it would probably be wise to be more careful with the benchmark
> suite than we were with the testsuites.  ie, let's keep track of where the
> code came from at the least so that we'll know its status if we ever want to
> consider including the benchmarks.

At the moment, it looks like this:

all tests in the "tests" subdir are GPL'd, everything else which is free but
not gpl'ed is in the "nongpl" dir.

Every benchmark added to the suite is required to have a SOURCE comment (here
is an example from linpack.f):

c     TEST linpack_f
c     SOURCE http://www.netlib.org/benchmarks/
c     DESC 100x100 linpack, initialization time is also measured
c     CAT fortran
c     END

all of which, btw, should be machine parseable. The worst that could happen
would be to get rid of the nongpl parts.

> It'll also force us to think a little before including something -- where did
> it come from, what are the redistribution terms, are we in compliance with 
> the redistribution terms.

the SOURCE comment can't answer this. I thought about adding a
machine-parsable LICENSE comment or similar, but would this be of any help?
I'd rather create sgi and bsd subdirectories...

(Comments welcome ;)

How about an ASSIGNED keyword indicating wether the tests are assigned,
should the need arise. And an AUTHOR comment?

IF we ever would distribute the benchmark suite (I don't yet see the need to
anyway), we will have to think about the home-grown licenses in the nongpl
dir.

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