Re: RFC: Testsuite patches, a few comments and questions...

[Andrew Cagney <ac131313 at cygnus dot com>]

Scott Bambrough wrote:

[Wow! detailed analysis snipped]

> While I did this work in the branch, I'm not convinced the patch is suitable for
> it.  Any comments?

I'd agree with this.  Getting the testsuite fixes into the trunk (not
the GDB 5.0 branch) would be the best thing.  That way people can
concentrate on getting things fixed ready for 5.1.

If the 5.0 branch suddenly gained a heap more failures, I've this fear
that people would try to fix the branch when a proper fix on the trunk
would be easier in the long term.

-- The following are more general comments:

With regard to XFAIL.  My understanding is that it indicates something
that can't be fixed (technical limitation) rather than won't be fixed
(not enough time :-( :-).  The test maintainers will probably correct me
:-).  I think people checking in testsuite fixes / extensions should be
encouraged, even/especially when those fixes increase the number of
testsuite failures.

For the curious, I've a two fold strategy for tracking a target. 
Firstly I've a rough idea of the number of expected failures.  Secondly,
I've a recently saved gdb/testsuite/gdb.{sum,log} that I can compare my
latest test-run against.  That way I can easily pick up recent testsuite
additions / changes.

	Andrew