Re: Replacing DejaGNU

[Jakub Jelinek <jakub at redhat dot com>]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 03:50:32PM +0100, Paolo Carlini wrote:
> On 14/01/19 15:35, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
> > On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 03:15:05PM +0100, MCC CS wrote:
> > > Thank you for the quick replies. I was inspired by
> > > https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-help/2012-04/msg00223.html
> > > but it seems, according to your comments, that was outdated.
> > So, I don't really see what would help you replacing the testsuite
> > framework, moreover, we have like 400k tests now and many of them
> > use simpler or more complicated tcl expressions in them, including almost
> > 2.5MB of pure tcl code.  Replacing it with something different and
> > incompatible is lots of work, especially when all you want is work around a
> > bug in some broken OS.
> 
> I'm not an expert but certainly there are long standing issues with DejaGNU,
> well beyond perfornance, right? I remember Mark Mitchell doing some work in
> this area which, as far as I can remember, had nothing to do with
> performance per se. And, well, some of these issues are obvious to explain,
> like not being able to check for *duplicate* error messages. I remember
> briefly discussing this with Dodji in Manchester.

I think several testcases check for duplicate error messages, the regexp is
against the whole text, so you can just check if it occurs more than once
there.

> Just wanted to make sure this kind of public discussion isn't completely
> suppressed.

I don't want to suppress any discussion, all I wanted to say is that
replacing the testsuite framework is a multi-year project and if it is done,
we'd need to decide on the benefits and disadvantages (even if it has a
superset of the features current framework has, having each developer learn
a new framework is non-trivial cost too).

	Jakub