From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jim Blandy To: Michael Elizabeth Chastain Cc: fnasser@cygnus.com, ac131313@cygnus.com, fnasser@redhat.com, gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com, keiths@cygnus.com Subject: Re: [RFA] Assuming malloc exists in callfwmall.exp Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2001 08:51:00 -0000 Message-id: References: <200102152056.MAA27190@bosch.cygnus.com> X-SW-Source: 2001-02/msg00289.html I think I see what Michael C. is getting at now. We've (or at least I've) been asserting that callfwmall expects behavior from GDB which is not promised or guaranteed --- the ability to evaluate array literals in inferiors that don't explicitly link in malloc. However, any test actually exercises a zillion things. For example, callfwmall exercises GDB's command parser, its symbol table reader, etc. Michael's pointing out that callfwmall also tests GDB's ability to *invoke inferior functions* in programs that don't explicitly link in malloc. Which, frankly, hadn't occurred to me, since inferior function invocation itself has zippo to do with malloc. But the file's name does suggest that this is its purpose. You have to know its contents and history to see what's really going on. So the real disagreement is whether this is a valuable thing to test for. Since I cannot imagine any reasonable inferior function invocation mechanism that would rely on the existence of malloc, I think it's as useless to test for that as to test for, say, the ability of GDB to handle functions named `t_structs_i' (which callfwmall also tests for us!).