Re: Lessons learned from compiler error/warnings tests

[David Malcolm <dmalcolm at redhat dot com>]

On Fri, 2016-09-09 at 14:28 +0200, Florian Weimer wrote:
> For compile-time fortify checks (such as the wrappers for type-safe 
> open/openat), we need to add tests in glibc which examine the
> compiler 
> output for warnings and errors.
> 
> I do not want to add Dejagnu as a dependency to the glibc test suite,
> but I wonder if you could share any lessons learned from the testing 
> support facility in GCC.
> 
> Would you suggest to mirror the GCC directives exactly?
> 
> I probably have to implement the testing directive parser as a small
> C 
> program.

Is Python acceptable as a dependency for the test suite?  String
parsing is likely to be saner in Python than in C, especially when the
requirements grow over time.

(FWIW, I'd much prefer it if DejaGnu were implemented in Python rather
than Tcl; writing and debugging .exp files below gcc/testsuite is one
of my least favorite activities in gcc development; we have all kinds
of nasty kludges involving global variables, peeking at names in the
stack frames above us, and other fragile coding practices.  Some of
this may be to do with Tcl, and some to do with legacy code, I guess).