Re: [PATCH] Remove symlinks created in argv0-symlink.exp and general cleanup

[Doug Evans <dje@google.com>]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2015 at 10:21 AM, Joel Brobecker <brobecker@adacore.com> wrote:
>> Personally, I'd vote for making in-tree builds, or at least testing,
>> officially unsupported.  I think gcc already does so...
>
> We should seriously discuss this, one day, as we keep having to
> spend time fixing issues specific to that mode.

I don't have a strong opinion on making in-tree testing unsupported,
but I do have a strong opinion on another thing that can make the
in-tree testing issue moot.

Let's remove all of testsuite/*/Makefile.in, they're always
out of date anyway (i.e., no one updates gdb.foo/Makefile.in to
remove binaries added by new tests),
and except for "make clean" aren't really used for anything.
The "make clean" in testsuite/Makefile.in can just "rm -rf foo bar ..."
[where "foo bar ..." are *not* the gdb.* testsuite dirs, but rather
the outputs,etc. directories of check-parallel]
IOW, testing would create the needed directories on the fly,
even in serial mode,
and to simplify "make clean" they'd always be put in a fixed
subdir of testsuite (just like check-parallel does now).

As for whether to always have one directory per test
(in serial and parallel modes), that *could* be treated as a separate
issue, but if it reduces complexity by doing the same thing
for serial and parallel then great.
[And while in-tree testing could still be unsupported,
I think(!) the current issue with it would be fixed.]