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

David Carlton
2002-10-24T21:39:44Z

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 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.

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.

David Carlton
carlton@math.stanford.edu