Re: [cplus] An initial use of the canonicalizer

[mec.gnu@mindspring.com (Michael Elizabeth Chastain)]

> That's why I'm not submitting it for mainline yet.  Sorry if I wasn't
> clear.  The [cplus] tag means it's going on my branch.

Oh, I know.  I'd like to express my concern sooner rather than later.

> For now I'm just kludging around things so that I can see when I
> introduce regressions on my branch.

That part is fine.

> Let's talk about the problem.  Which is more important - checking GDB
> 6.0 against GCC HEAD, or being able to verify that I've successfully
> canonicalized _all_ of GDB's output patterns?

I would actually pick the former, checking gdb 6.0 versus gcc HEAD.
Here's why.

To me, the most important property of a gdb release is that it doesn't
introduce regressions versus the previous gdb release.  I want
*everyone* with gdb 6.0 to be able to upgrade to gdb 6.1 (except for
explicitly deprecated things).

It's tough for me to find these regressions because the test suite has a
lot of noise (300 non-PASS results that we routinely ignore) and bugs
often manifest in very subtle ways.

So it helps a lot if the same test suite works with gdb 6.0 and gdb HEAD.
Then I have to spend less time grubbing in gdb.log files.

> I'd like to consider "volatile char *" a bug when we're expecting to
> see "char volatile*", not accept both.

That would be great with me.  Then I would see "gdb 6.0 FAIL,
gdb HEAD PASS".  But what you did was change:

  - volatile char ?\\*
  + .*char.* ?\\*

So there used to be a volatile required, but now there is none.
That's the part I don't like.

Michael C