Re: ACATS legal status cleared by FSF

[<guerby at acm dot org>]

> I think this may be the crux of the difference between the B tests and
> the existing "noncompile" tests for gcc and g++.  We - all the people
> arguing for inclusion of noncompile tests - are used to a context
> where it is easy to automate verification that diagnostics are
> correctly issued.

We here = everyone, I know of no one that posted and is against the
inclusion of B tests. And yes "it is easy to automate" for ACATS too,
but once you have done (and/or adapted from ACT) the baselining
(proper GCC specific marking and splitting) for 11886 errors in 1525
files. The ACATS writers of course did marking, but targeted at no
specific compiler, and that means not for the current GCC in
particular. This work (marking at the right place and splitting so the
compiler dont abort in the middle) has been done as part of growing
the noncompile section of the GCC testsuite, but that's not zero sum
work.

Once you have that done for ACATS, when you improve or change error
recovery or introduce new messages, or change the place where message
are emitted, you're faced with updating the baseline, and on ACATS,
that probably means something in the hundred of baseline updates in
addition to your 20 lines frontend patch. Not undoable of course (all
Ada vendors are doing it), but it will not necessarily mean that GCC
Ada error messages will improve because of it. 

BTW is there any record of the existing noncompile testsuite catching
problems, or did it just prevent any serious error message work by
scaring people?

And the main point: we need a volunteer.

> I'd like to see context - is the ACATS validation suite available
> online somewhere I can go look at it?

See my previous posts, at least:

<http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2001-12/msg00357.html>

PS: I'm behind schedule for the execute test tarball, may be during
this week or next weekend.

-- 
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>