path: root/TODO

Smaller items
=============

* Make the 'grep' proc support a -n option that is a synonym for
  'line'. The 'line' option must be retained for backward
  compatibility.

Bigger items
============

* Internationali[sz]ation.
* Use a throw-away slave interpreter for running each test case.
* Transfer timeouts should be dependent on file size and link speed.
* Add more support for target boards and RTOSes.
* Use the new expect terminal support for an "escape codes" API.
* Use expectk and write a GUI testing API, complete with record/playback.



Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 19:42:07 +0200
From: Jan Kratochvil <jan.kratochvil@redhat.com>
To: dejagnu@gnu.org
Subject: dejagnu-2.0 feature wishlist (from Cauldron 2013)

Hi,

I haven't found any discussion here about the features in hypothetical
dejagnu-2.0, as presented by Rob Savoye at Cauldron 2013.

I wrote some scripts on top of DejaGNU but I think at least some of the
functionality could be integrated into DejaGNU itself.  It depends whether
dejagnu-2.0 scope will remain the same or whether DejaGNU should be used
together with tools like buildbot or whether dejagnu-2.0 will integrate some
of the buildbot-like functionality (multi-note continuous runs).

Maybe there exists something similar already?  Originally I wrote it only for
myself but I see nowadays such tool may be useful for more people.

Former announcement of my scripts:
	https://sourceware.org/ml/archer/2010-q3/msg00194.html
URLs are no longer valid, the files can be found now at:
	git clone git://git.jankratochvil.net/nethome
	(that is my whole $HOME, not just the testsuite scripts)
The primary script 'hammock' is at:
	http://git.jankratochvil.net/?p=nethome.git;a=blob;f=bin/hammock

Essential fixup of current DejaGNU:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--orphanripper: It is used by default, normal DejaGNU scripts do not track
their spawned children which share fds 0/1/2 (stdio).  This means some such
children are due to *.exp code bugs occasionally leftover running forever.  As
they have their fds still open the testsuite with output redirected somewhere
will lock up at the end.  Some runaway processes also hog CPU for 100%.  The
following utility identifies runaway processes by using custom pty for them
and kills them at the end of testsuite run:
	http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/gdb.git/plain/gdb-orphanripper.c
It sure should be better integrated in DejaGNU somehow.

Features outside of the current scope of DejaGNU:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--distro: Testing in various OSes.  My script implement it based on chroot
(Fedora/RHEL has tool 'mock' for it), it has some performance/management
advantages but it has to (1) run all OSes with the same kernel, (2) mock
supports only Fedora/RHEL OSes, (3) it can run only x86_64/i386 arch this way.
The real solution should be multi-node (so that it can also support non-x86*
testing), for x86* it would be commonly using VMs.  But it still could support
even mock/chroot as it runs without the hassle of disk images.

--component: Pre-set remote repositories for download of gdb/binutils/gcc etc.
I want to run my patches on top of clean tree, not in some existing directory
which may have leftover files forgotten to be checked into repository etc.
Understandably it also supports local repository caches.
--srcrpm is similar, it builds tree from a prepared archive - I should be able
to provide also .src.rpm (or .tar.gz) to run the test for.
--branch asks for example for branch "gdb_7_6-branch" from the repository.

--file: Provide custom patches for the newly built tree.

--target: Provide a list of custom configure --target options.  This could be
more general such as to provide any custom configure options.

--parallel: Parallelization of multiple build+testsuite runs, not just
parallelization of the testsuite run part.
If I ask to build 40x binutils with 40 different targets I may want to do
run it in parallel (like with make -j8).

Convenience:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--gdbserver, --valgrind, --bfd32, --gdbindex, --dwz, --dwarf=X, --stabs:
Various pre-set options.  One can configure it by hand but it is too difficult
for daily use, for example for --dwz it means for GDB
	runtest CC_FOR_TARGET=/bin/sh\ $PWD/../contrib/cc-with-tweaks.sh\ -m\ gcc CXX_FOR_TARGET=/bin/sh\ $PWD/../contrib/cc-with-tweaks.sh\ -m\ g++ ...
	(plus also GNATMAKE_FOR_TARGET, GO_FOR_TARGET and GO_LD_FOR_TARGET)
For --valgrind it means other cryptic options like:
	RUNTESTFLAGS=--target_board=valgrind

Incomplete racy reads ("read1"):
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=12649
GDB testsuite contains (yes, it still contains them) various racy cases:
  gdb_test_multiple "set dprintf-style agent" $msg {
      -re "warning: Target cannot run dprintf commands.*" {
It commonly works as when expect does the read() syscall all the GDB output is
ready.  But occasionally the next testcase FAILs.  This is because
occasionally only part of the output gets read by the read() syscall, regex
gets matched but the final $gdb_prompt is not discarded - and the leftover
$gdb_prompt corrupts the next testcase below.  Sure the fix is:
  gdb_test_multiple "set dprintf-style agent" $msg {
    -re "warning: Target cannot run dprintf commands.*\r\n$gdb_prompt $" {

There is LD_PRELOAD *.so file in the Bug above to reproduce these cases
reliably.  There is also a reproducer of different kind of bugs ("writew")
although those do not happen so often AFAIK.  This functionality could be
better integrated into DejaGNU.

(Sure the primary problem is that the testsuite should not use regex matching
and it should use generic GDB MI output parser.  But that is a problem that
only a few GDB features have implemented the GDB MI interface.)

Diffing of results:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://git.jankratochvil.net/?p=nethome.git;a=blob;f=bin/diffgdb
 * GDB has various known FAILs.  They should be but they are not KFAILed or
   XFAILed.  (On recent Fedora I see there are only 23 of them but on CentOS-5
   there is 1063 of them.)
 * One is only interested in introduced regressions so one needs to diff two
   *.sum files.  Looking again and again at the same known FAILing cases is
   not productive.
 * During diff one is not interested for example in newly PASSing testcases.
   One also is not interested in FAIL->PASS cases.  One is definitely
   interested in PASS->FAIL regressions.  New FAILing testcases are also
   interesting.
Therefore the script above does a filtering of the diff results.  It parses
DejaGNU *.sum output although DejaGNU did already knew them internally.

The script also filters out unstable/racy results.  This may be outside of the
scope but in fact an unimplemented feature would be to provide statistics on
unstable results (so one can fix those) if I run the same build+testsuite many
times.

Not yet implemented: Finding a regression common reason:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I run 73 testsuite runs daily - primarily GDB in different OSes, for each OS
its x86_64 and i686 variant, for x86_64 OS also in -m32 mode.
If there happens a general regression I get 73 times PASS->FAIL result.  That
is not too convenient to filter out other changes out of the 73 regressions.
Moreover sometimes the regression affects for example only 32-bit OSes
- therefore there will be only about 24 PASS->FAILs and I have to figure out
in which testsuite combinations they happen.
In other cases the regression happens for example only on (older) RHELs and
not on Fedoras but that again means about 6 PASS->FAIL cases.
There would be nice some summary that this PASS->FAIL occured in testsuite
runs in directories rhel* and it did not occur in directories fedora* etc.