egcs testsuite & dejagnu : A special case?

[Jeffrey A Law]

  In message < 199806301344.JAA02773@melange.gnu.org >you write:
  > I've gotten the impression (not knowing much about how all this
  > testing stuff actually works at this point) that some of the problems
  > we've run into are due to attempting to be able to test an
  > *uninstalled* compiler as well as an installed one.  Is that true?
It's certainly a complication :-)  Though from where I sit testing the 
uninstalled compiler actually works quite well.

There's a couple quirks related to a bad choice we made for the runtime
library directory on native platforms ("libraries") that should go away
now that we use the target_alias as a directory name just like we do
for cross builds.

  > Certainly it's often the case that I want to run tests of my own
  > (using my own primitive test suite, or just try out a submitted
  > test case or something), and I've done a variety of things over
  > the years to cope with the fact that I want to try out a *built*,
  > but not *installed*, version of the compiler.
Likewise.  Though most of those scrips and hacks went away once dejagnu
got smart enough to test uninstalled tools.

  > It occurred to me that, maybe, we could avoid much of this trouble
  > by, instead of working around the differences between installed
  > and uninstalled compilers *externally* (to the compiler itself,
  > that is), we could define a new interface to the compiler *itself*
  > that, when invoked, amounts to saying "I'm invoking the *uninstalled*
  > compiler", and leave all the mucking about with pathnames and such
  > to the new interface.
An interesting thought.  Probably a good idea.

jeff