Subject: bug#67312: dejagnu creates testrun.{sum,log}

From: Jacob Bachmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2023 22:10:23 -0600

Tom Tromey wrote:
> Jacob> Are the produced files empty?  I will consider if there might be a
> Jacob> good way to detect a completely bogus run (example:  no test scripts
> Jacob> found at all) and bail out early without creating logfiles, but this
> Jacob> issue seems to be a valid use case that is misfiring in your
> Jacob> situation.
>
> They aren't zero-length but they don't contain any useful information at
> all.  You can easily try it yourself by "cd /tmp; runtest".

Indeed, running runtest in an empty directory produces useless 
(boilerplate) log and summary files.  The testsuite has (nominally) been 
located before the logs are opened, but DejaGnu currently has a big ball 
of mud around actually finding and running the tests and does not check 
for test files until after the logs have been opened.

Fixing this has been added to my TODO list, and extracting the "find 
tests" stage from "find and run tests" will be needed for the planned 
future native parallel testing support in any case.  This will require 
some fairly extensive overhauls in runtest.exp to separate that step and 
effectively plan tests before running them instead of just running 
them.  I am also planning to expand tool handling at some point, 
eventually allowing multiple --tool options to be given in a single run; 
the effect will be equivalent to consecutive runtest invocations, but 
may have better performance in parallel mode, since that would allow 
testing of different tools to overlap.

Until then, I will carry this bug report as a feature request.

-- Jacob