The use of the name tmpdir in the tests

[Nick Clifton]

Hi Ruud,

> This is an absolute detail, but as I am working on the test suite
> for gprofng, I noticed the use of a directory called "tmpdir".

> The thing is that in the case of gprofng at least, this is far from
> a temporary directory. It is going to contain the generated experiment
> data that is crucial for troubleshooting in case of a failure.

Wouldn't it be better for gprofng to store the data in a directory
named after the experiment ?  That way if the user runs multiple,
different experiments it would still be possible to determine which
directory contains the relevant data.



> Of course we could place those experiments elsewhere, but my idea
> was to give tmpdir a more meaningful name.
> 
> Are there any objections against doing so? For example, will
> certain scripts fail?

Probably.  There are lots of places in the binutils sources where
the "tmpdir" directory name is explicitly referenced, so you would
need a large patch to change them all.  Plus I would not be at all
surprised to find that there are users of the binutils who expect
to find certain things in the tmpdir directories.  So renaming
would definitely cause them problems.


> If not, any suggestion what would be a good name? I'm not that
> creative so don't get any further than "results" or "expresults"
> and am definitely open to suggestions.

How about "tmpdir-<experiment_name>" or "resultdir-<experiment_name>" ?

Cheers
   Nick