[m-rev.] for review: improve test framework

[Mark Brown]

On 15-Aug-2002, Zoltan Somogyi <zs at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> When fixing bugs, I often use .KEEP_OBJS to keep all the object files in
> stage2. If the fix passes the comparison of stage2 & stage3 but fails some
> test cases, I can modify a file to attempt to fix the problem and remake stage2
> (which often requires recompiling only a few files). I would then like to check
> whether this fixes the test case failures.
> 
> Typically I test some by hand, but this can get tedious, so I then invoke
> "bootcheck -2 -d dirname1 -d dirname2" to check the rest. Any time bootcheck
> spends on subdirectories of the named directories is a waste of time,
> because if the change fixes all the test cases, I of course also do a full
> bootcheck from scratch to check for any new problems.

As I implied earlier, I don't agree.  It is all too likely that
fixing the bug will introduce another bug, possibly in one of the
sub-directories.  The second bug will be caught by the full bootcheck,
of course, but not until much later.  Needless to say, a wasted full
bootcheck will take much more time than merely running the sub-directory
tests, even if you have to do this several times.

Cheers,
Mark.

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