Re: [patch/rfc] Remove all setup_xfail's from testsuite/gdb.mi/

Andrew Cagney
2002-10-24T21:57:12Z

> On Thu, 24 Oct 2002 14:41:05 -0400, Andrew Cagney <ac131313@redhat.com> said:
>
>
>> GDB's testsuite is known to be full of xfails that are really kfails
>> or testsuite bugs. Rather than try to audit each xfail in turn, the
>> proposal as been to rip out all the xfails (creating a clean slate)
>> and start marking up the tests from scratch - two steps forward but
>> first one step back.
>
>
> Can you give me a little guidance here? Elena recently made the
> suggestion that I should add tests to the testsuite for namespace
> stuff, even before I've modified GDB to handle that. That sounded
> sensible to me, so I added that to a branch, and marked them all as
> xfail.

I think Elena mentioned KFAIL. Any way, that is want you want to use -
you'll need to bug report any failures though.

> I suspect I was wrong about that, though I'm not sure about the
> subtleties of what xfail is actually supposed to mean. I was thinking
> I should go and change them to kfail, but now I'm not confident that I
> know the intended semantics of that, either. Is kfail only allowed
> for tests with a PR associated to them? Admittedly, in a branch,
> xfail and kfail mean whatever I want them to mean, I suppose, and I'm
> not going to try to get those tests added to the mainline unless I can
> bring along much of the code that cause them to pass instead of fail.

A fairly good definition is:

KFAIL == bug, in GDB, something to fix.
XFAIL == bug, not in GDB (kernel, debug info, linker, ...), something to
ignore.

> I guess I don't see the point in removing xfails from the testsuite:
> it's useful information, it doesn't make regression testing any harder
> (there, the main culprit is the !@#%# schedlock test), so why throw
> that away? If xfail has the wrong meaning, then change it to kfail;
> if kfail also has the wrong meaning, then change the meaning of kfail.

People have been XFAILing bugs in GDB. That is simply wrong.

Andrew