From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 10138 invoked by alias); 5 May 2011 22:34:26 -0000 Received: (qmail 9780 invoked by uid 22791); 5 May 2011 22:34:24 -0000 X-SWARE-Spam-Status: No, hits=-1.8 required=5.0 tests=AWL,BAYES_00,T_RP_MATCHES_RCVD X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Received: from mail.codesourcery.com (HELO mail.codesourcery.com) (38.113.113.100) by sourceware.org (qpsmtpd/0.43rc1) with ESMTP; Thu, 05 May 2011 22:34:07 +0000 Received: (qmail 21143 invoked from network); 5 May 2011 22:34:06 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO digraph.polyomino.org.uk) (joseph@127.0.0.2) by mail.codesourcery.com with ESMTPA; 5 May 2011 22:34:06 -0000 Received: from jsm28 (helo=localhost) by digraph.polyomino.org.uk with local-esmtp (Exim 4.72) (envelope-from ) id 1QI77V-0006Bk-3s; Thu, 05 May 2011 22:34:05 +0000 Date: Thu, 05 May 2011 22:34:00 -0000 From: "Joseph S. Myers" To: Hans-Peter Nilsson cc: gdb-patches@sourceware.org Subject: Re: Remove code handling old ARM aliases from GDB In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Mailing-List: contact gdb-patches-help@sourceware.org; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-patches-owner@sourceware.org X-SW-Source: 2011-05/txt/msg00161.txt.bz2 On Thu, 5 May 2011, Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote: > On Thu, 5 May 2011, Joseph S. Myers wrote: > > On Thu, 5 May 2011, Hans-Peter Nilsson wrote: > > > > > > -if { [istarget xscale*-*-*] } { > > > > +if { [istarget arm*-*-*] } { > > > > > How did you test these changes? > > > > I considered them sufficiently obviously syntactically correct not to need > > testing. > > It might have seemed like that at the time, but obviously it > wasn't so. Well, it was *syntactically correct*, as shown by the tests running in your log rather than hitting a Tcl syntax error. > > I don't call that breaking testing; I call that exposing bugs (whether in > > the simulator or testsuite) that were previously hidden by the use of an > > obsolete target triplet name. > > arm-elf passed before and does not anymore after those changes. "arm-elf" is not a testcase. A testsuite regression is when a test assertion fails before and passes after a patch. A test assertion corresponds to particular text that may appear after "PASS: " or "FAIL: " in the .sum file (for a properly functioning DejaGnu testsuite, a slightly looser definition may be appropriate for GDB at present). A failure of a test that was not run before the patch is not a regression. > That's breaking testing. No, breaking testing would be introducing a syntax error so that tests that previously run stop running or run incorrectly. Output with FAILs in it isn't broken, it simply gives information about what works and what doesn't. If a FAIL replaced a PASS that would be a regression, not breaking testing, but that isn't the case here either. > Any other definition falls prey to > "latent bugs" weaseling. The simulator bugs exposed weren't latent since the simulator probably had those bugs for years. So far as there were testsuite bugs (the tests not running) those were *fixed* by the patch. I consider the situation here to be exactly the same as if I'd added target-independent tests to the GDB testsuite for a feature that should work on all targets but that would require target-specific work for most targets to make it work properly. Such tests would, of course, expose bugs in various targets, but it would be up to those interested in improving results for each target to fix them there; I don't think there's any expectation that such new tests will pass everywhere. (An example of potential new tests that would have such an issue would be tests for how GDB handles argument passing and return involving complex numbers; that needs ABI support for each target, and very few GDB targets have such ABI support that actually corresponds to what GCC does.) I think enabling tests that were wrongly disabled is just like adding new tests - if someone fixing them is unclear about the semantics of instructions being tested, I'll try to advise on specific questions, just as I would on questions about the hypothetical tests for complex number ABIs. -- Joseph S. Myers joseph@codesourcery.com