Re: dejagnu(1) multi-launcher and dejagnu-report-card

[Ben Elliston]

Hi Jacob

On Tue, Nov 06, 2018 at 06:59:34PM -0600, Jacob Bachmeyer wrote:

> First, add a new dejagnu(1) multi-purpose launcher, in a style
> similar to git(1).  This allows to select at run-time between
> multiple versions of auxiliary tools, depending on what is available
> on the system.  This leads to a slightly more complex "structure"
> for DejaGnu, with an "inner core" (runtest(1) and its components)
> and an "outer core" (the dejagnu(1) subcommands) that is also
> installed. One of the reasons for this is that I would like the
> DejaGnu testsuite itself to use the dejagnu-report-card tool, and
> possibly for a future version of Automake to use it if the DEJATOOL
> variable indicates to test multiple tools.

I don't have a problem with this. runtest, of course, needs to remain
for backward compatibility, but could be invoked using 'dejagnu
runtest' (or 'dejagnu run').

> Second, the first subcommand to implement would be "dejagnu
> report-card", for which I already have shell and Tcl
> implementations.  This would then be usable as part of the DejaGnu
> testsuite to provide a nice summary at the end of a testsuite run.

There is a pretty high maintenance overhead of maintaining multiple
implementations. Why not just decide, conservatively, what the right
language is for the job, and we'll just make it a prerequisite to be
checked by 'configure'? If the tool (eg, AWK) is not available, we can
just abort the configure script, or not install the subcommand script.

> Future plans include some kind of "canned test" feature to help with
> creating new testsuites and adding tools. Something like "dejagnu
> create testsuite" and "dejagnu add tool" would be nice.

Now that I like.

Cheers, Ben

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