Re: isremote and unix board special handling question

[Brooks Moses]

On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 5:10 PM, Rob Savoye <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 11/28/18 2:10 PM, Brooks Moses wrote:
>> Much like the other big lesson of the last 30 years or so: Shipping
>> something that works is far more valuable than waiting to try to
>> achieve perfection.  :)
>
>   It was worse than that. :-) When I started DejaGnu, there were only 7
> of us in all of Cygnus, and the GCC team wanted a way to cross test, so
> it got used daily while under heavy development. Plus none of us (me)
> really knew how cross testing needed to work, which is obvious in the
> code. :-) Sorry...

Fair enough -- but having done cross-testing on both GCC (with
DejaGnu) and glibc (without it), and having also done some substantial
porting work to get the GCC testing working with our systems, I have
to say that making things work with it is still much better than
making things work without it.  I never did get the glibc cross-tests
working.

>   My daydream is to analyze the current functionality, write a true
> design doc, and write a new python based implementation. :-) We need
> something that'll last another 30 years, and last I checked, Tcl has no
> maintainers...

You might be entertained to know that we (Google) have been running
the libstdc++ testsuite on our Bazel-based build farm using a Python
script that interprets the "dg-*" annotations in the test files and
builds and runs them accordingly.  It turned out to be pretty
straightforward, though of course that's just one fairly limited use
and we could get away with ignoring a lot of pieces we didn't need.

One of the interesting things I learned from that is that I actually
ended up doing almost no porting of the DejaGnu code itself; the
porting was almost all of functionality provided by the "library" code
that the GCC testsuites add on top of it.  Admittedly, that's because
the "figure out which tests to run" and "run a test on this kind of
machine" functionality is provided by our build-farm infrastructure,
but I still found it noteworthy how separable the pieces were.

- Brooks