Re: ACATS & GCC testsuite

[Geert Bosch <bosch at gnat dot com>]

On Thursday, Mar 27, 2003, at 17:34 America/New_York, Laurent Guerby 
wrote:
> I know that the version of GNAT based on 3.2 delivered to customers
> fixes the 40 or so ACATS tests failing in the current
> public CVS (since I'm an ACT customer, but I also
> know it has other problems :).

In the last few weeks (since the beta-release you speak about), we
have taken the following steps to contributing our GNAT changes to
the FSF GCC tree, and be able to do this on a more regular basis in
the future:

  - Put into place infrastructure that allows us to develop
    GNAT on the GCC HEAD branch in parallel with the last stable
    release version

  - Updated front end / back end interface as required for the
    extensive changes made in this area since GCC 3.2

  - Merged in changes made to FSF tree with ACT changes, and
    adapted our procedures to match those used by rest of GCC
    project (no $Revision lines in headers, for example)

  - Checked in two bug fixes for the back end, which are required
    by the Ada sources we are contributing

We are now at the stage that we can successfully bootstrap the
latest GCC with the latest GNAT sources. The tasks to be completed
in the coming weeks are the following:

  - Porting remaining back end patches against GCC 3.2.2 that could not
    go into that release to current GCC

  - Merging in our changes of GNAT back into the FSF repository

These last two action items will be done in parallel and first Ada
patches will go in this week. The makefiles are the biggest challenge
for this last item. Problems with setting up the GCC test suite
(see my message in http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2003-03/msg01134.html)
are holding up integrating the back end patches.

> Integrated ACATS testing has zero interest
> until there are effective interactions between the ACT tree
> and the public tree, see Richard Kenner's response
> to my request on wether ACT outsiders could help
> chasing Ada regressions (answer: no, total waste
> of volunteer time).

I'm not sure which message you're paraphrasing here, but I'm sure
there must be a miscommunication here. It is of course extremely
valuable if any regressions are caught when they occur!

> I'm currently spending my limited free time on other projects
> but will be happy to resume my efforts when it's useful.

I think it would be very useful to have ACATS testing
capability for GCC at any time. If you prefer to wait
until after sources have been merged, so we'll start out with
few or no failures, that is fine. However, having regression
tests is useful at any point. If we have 40 failures now, it
may indeed not make sense for volunteers to go hunt at them
at this point while ACT is working on integrating the fixes,
but if any new failures occur they represent real regressions.

> The current ACATS setup has been used by some people
> to check various ports (some of them not supported
> by ACT), I update it when new ACATS releases are made (a few weeks ago
> BTW) and I run it regularly on my home machine.
That's good to know, thanks for your work here.

> My last email to Geert and Robert on the topic (ada/5909) was
> sent one month ago, without reply unless I missed it.

While I try to keep up with all GCC mail, I think I must have missed
your message. I just checked ada/5909 and don't see your message there
either, so could you resend it? If you don't receive a reply on a
message within a week or so, please ping me again.

  -Geert