Re: ACATS & GCC testsuite

[Laurent Guerby <guerby at acm dot org>]

On Fri, 2003-03-28 at 11:40, Richard Kenner wrote:
>     I'm not sure why autogen is needed for testing, the
>     only thing you need is dejagnu and then "make -k check"
>     just works. (I have dejagnu-1.4.2-6 on my RedHat 8.0 machine).
> 
> But you also have to do a full build and doing it in maintainer-mode is
> best.  Those require automake, autogen, and autoheader.

What are the arguments behind "best" here? Are the ACT releases built in
maintainer-mode? Same question for binary distributors like Linux
vendors? 

When I do testing I'd like to test it in a configuration
where I'm as close as possible as what a user of our source-based
release would do. Other testing scenario are useful, but far less than
this one IMHO.

That's why I by far prefer to have the testing being done
after install, and not in build like it is done for GCC
via DejaGNU now. It looks like I have no chance
of changing this sad state of affair, but well I
can still make a separate package for Ada.

Not testing in real world release conditions is a good way to get
into major trouble (red faces and all the stuff) for
no good reason.

Doing other kind of testing is nice but not essential.

BTW <http://gcc.gnu.org/install/configure.html> says:

--enable-maintainer-mode
        The build rules that regenerate the GCC master message catalog
        gcc.pot are normally disabled. This is because it can only be
        rebuilt if the complete source tree is present. If you have
        changed the sources and want to rebuild the catalog, configuring
        with --enable-maintainer-mode will enable this. Note that you
        need a recent version of the gettext tools to do so. 
        
        
Is it up to date? Looks like it's mentionning only
translation stuff. (I've never used maintainer mode.)

>     http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2003-01/msg01299.html
> 
> Note that the "total waste of time" was *your* wording, not mine!  I was
> agreeing with it due to the reason Geert gave yesterday: tracking down the
> ACAS failures most likely will duplicate work already done.

Sorry if my wording did imply you used these words, I was
refering to the real world net end result: my partial tracking of those
issues a few monthes ago was a total waste of my volunteer time.

-- 
Laurent Guerby <guerby at acm dot org>