Re: Merging lessons

[Jan Kratochvil <jan dot kratochvil at redhat dot com>]

Hi,

On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:39:29 +0100, Rick Moseley wrote:
> I'm sure Jan has some more experience and I hope he will add to what I have
> written here.

(a1) Run the testsuite on all the supported arches.  Do not run the testsuite
     on shared boxes as the GDB testsuite can (could) crash both ptrace and
     utrace kernels.  Also run the testsuite on the right kernel version as at
     least threads debugging support differs on older kernels.  Do not use
     KVM.  As a summary do not use Koji / any build farms for the testsuite.

(a2) Even during development I use for ./configure many options from:
     http://cvs.jankratochvil.net/viewcvs/nethome/bin/errs1?rev=HEAD
     IIRC suggested by Tom: --enable-targets=all
       (our change could break a target not being build on our host)
     -lmcheck (memory corruption checking cheap enough for daily use)
     -Wp,-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 -fstack-protector (rpmbuilt-like runtime checks)

(a3) During larger rebase do not try to save time by hoping it will build out
     of the box on any of the arches.  Each arch will require at least one
     minor fixup by hand anyway.

(a4) Try to easily drop the patches which got imported to the base sourcetree
     but be sure to not to drop something not imported there.  Not each patch
     has a testcase as occasionally it is too difficult to make it.  In Fedora
     I put the backported patches to an single file which one can easily drop,
     "gdb-6.X-upstream.patch", but in fact many patches get checked in the
     branched sources before being accepted for the base sourcetree and later
     they get accepted there in a modified/different form.  I am not aware of
     any universal foolproof approach, one needs to know+track the patches.

(a5) Run even the biarch (-m32/-m64) and/or PIE (-fPIE) testsuite/testcases.
     I will not write more about it as it is not 100% working for me so far.


Regards,
Jan