Re: Need suggestions on how to test observer.c

[David Carlton <carlton at math dot stanford dot edu>]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2003 14:43:56 -0800, Joel Brobecker <brobecker at gnat dot com> said:

> The ideal solution would be to use this little program as the unit-test
> driver, and have a dejagnu testcase check its output. Unfortunately,
> this program would of course depend on observer.o, which depends on
> utils.o which depends on [... etc]. Not easy to put in place. One
> possible approach would be to link the test program against libgdb.a
> and dependents. In fine, we would more or less link the test program
> with the same command as for gdb itself. This is a rather brutal approach,
> but this should be easy to use to generate other unit-test drivers.
> This would require a large change in the testsuite Makefiles, and
> I haven't looked at how this could be done.

I agree that GDB should have more unit tests, and the idea of linking
libgdb.a was the best idea I could come up with.  Some difficulties
that might arise:

* Getting the Makefiles to work.  Probably not too hard, but who
  knows.

* Making sure that we can generate output that dejagnu likes.  dejagnu
  actually comes with a header file dejagnu.h that could be helpful
  here (though that might be a C++-only thing; I'm not sure).

* Would linking against libgdb.a take a long time?  If so, that would
  pose problems.  On the other hand, if the alternative is to run GDB
  on itself, then that's not the speediest thing to do either.

* And, of course, GDB isn't always modular enough to make writing unit
  tests easy, but there's not much we can do about that.

David Carlton
carlton at math dot stanford dot edu