Re: [maint] [maint] Michael Chastain for testsuite

[Bob Rossi <bob at brasko dot net>]

On Sat, Jun 05, 2004 at 01:02:24PM +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Peter Barada <peter@the-baradas.com>
> > Date: Fri,  4 Jun 2004 20:17:06 -0400 (EDT)
> > 
> > I'd like to see a testcase being *required* to be added that shows a
> > current failure *before* a patch for its fix is accepted.
> 
> That's a noble goal, but what do we do in cases where it's
> impractical?  For example, a particular bug could only be raising its
> ugly head in a very large program.

Well, it's a tough decision. Obviously it's impractical to run many
large programs to prove the behavior of GDB is correct. However, once
the bug fix is committed with out a testcase, you can consider it broken
already. What can break, will.

BTW, over the years, I have had a lot of experience with finding bugs in
large programs. It can take hours to find the bug, however, once it is
found, I typically find that it can be reproduced with a very small
segment of the original code. I doubt you would need to run a test on a
large program in almost all cases, you will probably have to create a
subset of the original code, and use that as the testcase.

Bob Rossi

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