Re: egcs testsuite & dejagnu : A special case?

[Craig Burley <burley at gnu dot org>]

>I install a full tree every now and then, but for the day to day
>stuff, I only ever use the build directory.  Also, you can get around
>names by having sym links from things like ../local/bin/gcc272 to
>../local/gcc-2.7.2.3/bin/gcc have only have local/bin in your path.

I'm a bit lost in the parsing of that, but I think I know what you're
saying.  If I'm right, that eases the invocation of a compiler
installed in one of a variety of paths named after the version, to
keep track of things.  (I've been doing that for the past several
months, and boy is it worthwhile, and worth the extra typing, to just
*know* what version of what compiler I'm invoking at any one time.)

What I'm suggesting is a way to "elegantly" export, from the egcs
"system", a single command name that invokes the built command
instead of the installed command.

I recognize that we've already gotten "this" to work, but by "this"
I think is typically meant "exporting of the *internal knowledge*
of how to invoke a built, but perhaps not installed, command in
egcs", in that other products have what *should* be impertinent
knowledge of egcs/gcc internals.  (I'm thinking of the recent
`g77 -v' fiasco, for example.)

Generally, I much prefer the concept of data hiding, when we can get
away with it.  :)

>A way I like better is to have an etc/{g77,gcc,g++} in the build tree
>that invokes out of the build tree, and if you want it, you just use
>it.

IMO, better.  Much, much better.  `etc' is a widely recognized name
for this sort of stuff; if people don't like that, other names
could be `built' and such, but I like `etc' offhand.

>> For example, what if we had the build process automatically build,
>> but not install (obviously), shell scripts
>
>Yes.
>
>> Does this idea have any merit?
>
>Yes.

Glad to hear I'm not obviously crazy.  I think if we'd had this
about 5 years ago in gcc, lots of annoying things would have been
much easier to set up and deal with.  But I don't think it's
too late to be worth doing, especially if it means, down the road,
we can someday rip out internal knowledge of egcs/gcc from other
products that really shouldn't be knowin' that stuff.

Would this be worth trying to put into 1.1?  (Isn't the freeze date
for that coming up, like, this week?)  If so, I'll try and do the
work tout-de-suite myself unless someone (anyone :) with more
scripting knowledge steps forward.  Otherwise, I'll just leave it
on my list and get to it when it percolates to the top (should
be within a couple of months or so, though the fact that I'd find
it personally useful might speed things up).

        tq vm, (burley)