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

[Michael Snyder <msnyder@redhat.com>]

Andrew Cagney wrote:
> 
> > 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.

We all agree about that.