ACATS legal status cleared by FSF

[mike stump]

> From: dewar@gnat.com
> To: kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu, zack@codesourcery.com
> Cc: gcc@gcc.gnu.org
> Date: Fri,  7 Dec 2001 20:39:54 -0500 (EST)

> <<One possibility is to run the B tests in a non-conventional way, where all
> the test harness does is to check for the presence of at least one
> error line for each line marked ERROR.  I don't know how hard such a
> harness is to write, and that's not the way B tests are usually done, but
> might work.
> >>

> That's not good enough, the errors often do not occur on exactly the correct
> lines.

We have years of experience with such a scheme for C++, it works, it
is useful, it isn't a maintenance burden.  I find the value of it
easily outweighs the maintenance cost of it.

If your compiler randomly changes around where messages come out all
the time, maybe you should re-engineer it from the top down, fix all
of them to be correct, once, fix the testcases in the testsuite to
conform to it, and then refuse any changes to this status quo for 5-10
years, and then after 5 years, put in all the changes enmass you would
like, redo the testsuite, lather, rise, repeat.