[Ltrace-devel] 0005-Disable-glibc-core-debuginfo-tests.patch

[Ivan Zakharyaschev]

Hi!

Thanks bringing all the problems with tests to surface! I have a few 
comments concerning the suggested patch. I'll start with the one which 
looks most messy.

It's a pity to unconditionally disable all the tests which depend on the 
presence of debuginfo for glibc.

Of course, from one side, some of these 4 functions used for tests (ftell, 
usleep, nanosleep, strlen) have recently started to produce less valuable 
test results than in former glibc versions -- see 
https://github.com/dkogan/ltrace/commit/9193ab324173439f2140174ec43434e43081393a 
for an explanation.

On the other side, the debuginfo for glibc is not always available, and 
this presents a problem for accurate packaging of ltrace.

But these are different problems, and solving them by simply commenting 
out all the tests is not the interesting solution.

As for the first problem, I'd replace strlen and nanosleep (which now give 
non-valuable results) with some other glibc functions. I'd even leave the 
tests with strlen and nanaosleep in the old form as known "X-FAIL" tests 
(but I'm not sure that the testing system has such a notion), so that they 
remain as a challenge for future developers who could develop the 
technique of analyzing the calls and reading the debuginfo in such 
complicate cases. (What would gdb show?)

Some of tests with these 4 funcions test some other features of ltrace in 
combination with DWARF-reading, so that they still are interesting 
regardless of the problesm with strlen and nanosleep. (That's why I have 
called this patch messy: it's difficult to undestand from the patch which 
features are excluded from testing by it.)


As for the second problem, I'd simply add a switch which can be turned on 
to run the tests in a system where the debuginfo for glibc is installed.

(I'm including this individual patch in my message in the hope that it 
would be easier to follow what is going on in this discussion when the 
patch is near.)

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: 0005-Disable-glibc-core-debuginfo-tests.patch
Type: text/x-patch
Size: 2256 bytes
Desc: 
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/ltrace-devel/attachments/20171122/0b98a446/attachment.bin>