Re: [RFA] Assuming malloc exists in callfwmall.exp

Jim Blandy
2001-02-16T08:51:00Z

I think I see what Michael C. is getting at now.

We've (or at least I've) been asserting that callfwmall expects
behavior from GDB which is not promised or guaranteed --- the ability
to evaluate array literals in inferiors that don't explicitly link in
malloc.

However, any test actually exercises a zillion things. For example,
callfwmall exercises GDB's command parser, its symbol table reader,
etc.

Michael's pointing out that callfwmall also tests GDB's ability to
*invoke inferior functions* in programs that don't explicitly link in
malloc. Which, frankly, hadn't occurred to me, since inferior
function invocation itself has zippo to do with malloc. But the
file's name does suggest that this is its purpose. You have to know
its contents and history to see what's really going on.

So the real disagreement is whether this is a valuable thing to test
for. Since I cannot imagine any reasonable inferior function
invocation mechanism that would rely on the existence of malloc, I
think it's as useless to test for that as to test for, say, the
ability of GDB to handle functions named `t_structs_i' (which
callfwmall also tests for us!).