Re: dejagnu version update?

[Jeff Law <law at redhat dot com>]

On 09/16/2015 10:25 AM, Ramana Radhakrishnan wrote:
> On 16/09/15 17:14, Mike Stump wrote:
> > On Sep 16, 2015, at 12:29 AM, Andreas Schwab <schwab@suse.de>
> > wrote:
> > > Mike Stump <mikestump@comcast.net> writes:
> > >
> > > > The software presently works with 1.4.4 and there aren’t any
> > > > changes that require anything newer.
> > >
> > > SLES 12 has 1.4.4.
> >
> > Would be nice to cover them as well, but their update schedule, 3-4
> > years, means that their next update is 2018.  They didn’t update to
> > a 3 year old stable release of dejagnu for their last OS, meaning
> > they are on a > 7 year update cycle.  I love embedded and really
> > long term support cycles (20 years), but, don’t think we should
> > cater to the 20 year cycle just yet.  :-)  Since 7 is substantially
> > longer than 2, I don’t think we should worry about it.  If they had
> > updated at the time, they would have had 3 years of engineering and
> > testing before the release and _had_ 1.5.
>
> Sorry about the obvious (possibly dumb) question.
>
> Can't we just import a copy of dejagnu each year and install it as
> part of the source tree ? I can't imagine installing dejagnu is
> adding a huge amount of time to build and regression test time ?
> Advantage is that everyone is guaranteed to be on the same version. I
> fully expect resistance due to specific issues with specific versions
> of tcl and expect, but if folks aren't aware of this .....
That should work -- certainly that's the way we used to do things at 
Cygnus.  Some of that code may have bitrotted as single tree builds have 
fallen out-of-favor through the years.

As to whether or  not its a good idea.  I'm torn -- I don't like copying 
code from other repos because of the long term maintenance concerns.

I'd rather just move to 1.5 and get on with things.  If some systems 
don't have a new enough version, I'm comfortable telling developers on 
those platforms that they need to update.  It's not like every *user* 
needs dejagnu, it's just for the testing side of things.


jeff