From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 30408 invoked by alias); 22 Dec 2002 04:20:47 -0000 Mailing-List: contact gdb-patches-help@sources.redhat.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: gdb-patches-owner@sources.redhat.com Received: (qmail 30401 invoked from network); 22 Dec 2002 04:20:45 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO jackfruit.Stanford.EDU) (171.64.38.136) by 209.249.29.67 with SMTP; 22 Dec 2002 04:20:45 -0000 Received: (from carlton@localhost) by jackfruit.Stanford.EDU (8.11.6/8.11.6) id gBM4KX929337; Sat, 21 Dec 2002 20:20:33 -0800 X-Authentication-Warning: jackfruit.Stanford.EDU: carlton set sender to carlton@math.stanford.edu using -f To: Michael Elizabeth Chastain Cc: fnasser@redhat.com, jimb@redhat.com, gdb-patches@sources.redhat.com Subject: Re: [Jim Blandy ] RFA: Add tests for lookup_symbol_aux bug References: <200212210659.gBL6xZJ31187@duracef.shout.net> From: David Carlton Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2002 21:14:00 -0000 In-Reply-To: <200212210659.gBL6xZJ31187@duracef.shout.net> Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) XEmacs/21.4 (Common Lisp) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-SW-Source: 2002-12/txt/msg00613.txt.bz2 On Sat, 21 Dec 2002 00:59:35 -0600, Michael Elizabeth Chastain said: > It feels a little strange to have a test which will PASS almost all the > time, even if gdb is broken. For what it's worth, this test has already caught an unrelated bug, so it's having surprising benefits. I think probably the test suite doesn't pound on the partial symbol table as much as it could, so even narrowly targeted partial symbol tests like this one are useful. > (For instance, we could add some maint commands to gdb to force > specific algorithmic paths in the symbol table reader so that test > scripts can exercise them). That sounds like an interesting idea. I do think that unit tests are useful, and unfortunately some parts of the symbol table (especially partial symbols) are buried a bit too deep in GDB's innards to be able to easily do unit testing on via the test suite. Maybe maint commands would help with that. It would take some thinking to do well, though... David Carlton carlton@math.stanford.edu