New features in Jacks test suite.

[Mo DeJong <mdejong at cygnus dot com>]

(Here is a quick fwd of a note I posted to jikes-dev)

I thought I would drop everyone a quick note about some
of the cool new features I added to the Jacks test suite.

I added a bunch of new tests for JLS sections, we are now
up to about 43 tests. Every supported compiler now fails
at least one test.

The compile tests will correctly detect a core dump from the
compiler and report COREDUMP instead of FAIL. This is really
handy because gcj core dumps a lot.

We can generate test case documentation automatically,
take a look at jacks/docs/tests.html to see how cool this is.

Logging of test case results is now supported. As tests are
run the results will be written to a file in the logging/
subdirectory. This is very cool because you can check to
see if your changes broke anything using "cvs diff".

This also provides "auto recovery" in case of a crash
during a test run. If for example, we had a test case
that sucked up 100% of the CPU, the user would need
to kill it with a Ctrl-C. The next time the test were
run, the system would notice that a test had been
started but never finished, and it would restart
the tests, skipping until after the one that crashed.

Added another compiler specific test example (for gcj this time).

Added an "all" target that will run all the test cases for
each supported compiler when you type "jacks all". This is
really cool because you can check the status of your test
case with all 4 supported compilers by typing one command.

Also, you don't even have to actually put your test cases
in the jacks/tests directory structure to be able to
run them. You can create a tests.tcl file in any directory
and still run the test using the "jacks" command.

I am also going to get a "jacks" mailing list set up
on the IBM OSS server. Other folks might want to help
out with jacks, but I doubt they would want to read
a bunch of unrelated posts on jikes-dev.


Here is the CVS info in case you want to try it out.

setenv CVSROOT :pserver:anoncvs@CVS.Sourcery.Org:/cvs/jikes

cvs login
paswsd anoncvs

cvs checkout jacks

cheers
Mo DeJong
Red Hat Inc