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Re: recent dejagnu changes


Jim Ingham wrote:
> 
> Before this thread is entirely retired, it is a little worthwhile to point
> out that it is REALLY unfortunate that the testing framework for a set of
> tools as important as gdb & gcc has NO maintainer (and is in such generally
> poor shape as Dejagnu undoubtly is).  Now, I am not myself volunteering - I
> have a spare time Free Software project already and no spare time to boot.
> And I realize that some similar thing is probably true of everyone on this
> list.  However, I also bet that many of the people on this list have started
> out to make some simple change to dejagnu, and ended up wasting hours
> tearing their hair out over this or that infelicity in the Dejagnu source...
> 

Although there is no official maintainer for Dejagnu specifically, Stan and I have
been trying to do a "keep it alive" sort of maintainership as part of the 
gdb testsuite maintainership.  That is why we do the patches reviews and approvals.

This means that we have revised the patches with help from people like Jim Bandy,
Elena Zannoni and many others that have used their spare cycles in helping this.

The situation of dejagnu is like other shared code like the disassembly.
That one, also used by gdb, is maintained by binutils people.  Dejagnu, although
also used by gcc, has been under gdb umbrella because we are the group that has
to deal with Tcl.

What Jim is probably refering to is people who actually spend time improving, 
cleaning up, etc.  This seems to require, more than never, some sort of sponsorship
(time == money) at least to get it out of the ground.  But it is hard to get investiments
for test software.  And, for some reason, it seems to be hard to get Tcl based projects
sponsored as well.  The current state is a consequence...

> This is a very unsatisfactory situation, and we need to do something about
> it.  I have no solution, just thought it is worthwhile to point out that the
> problem is more serious than just a mild collision between a couple of users
> of Dejagnu..
> 

I agree.

-- 
Fernando Nasser
Red Hat Canada Ltd.                     E-Mail:  fnasser@cygnus.com
2323 Yonge Street, Suite #300           Tel:  416-482-2661 ext. 311
Toronto, Ontario   M4P 2C9              Fax:  416-482-6299

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