Someone interested in writing a regression test suite for Hurd components?

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hello!

As we all know, the Hurd lacks a regression test suite.

Ben once began writing a test suite for libpipe, which can be retrieved
from his homepage.  I intend to integrate this into the Hurd build.

Now, Zheng Da has been submitting patches to fix bugs in rpctrace and
extend it in general.

Before installing these patches, I'd like to have a basic regression test
suite set-up that gives us some confidence that they don't in turn cause
breakage on other parts / uses of rpctrace.

For example, we already do have a few examples of code that works
stand-alone, but not when run by rpctrace, and we have patches to fix
that.

Now, testing rpctrace is not like testing libpipe, where you simply come
up with some testing programs that use the libpipe C API and do some
consistency checks alongside.  Testing rpctrace means running it against
testee programs, and then parse rpctrace's output and compare that
against a to-be-expected version.  Some fuzzy comparisions will be
needed, as PIDs and all sort of other things will vary between two runs
of the same testee.  Also some machinery to take care of hanging rpctrace
processes will be needed.

I guess that instead of starting to write shell scripts etc. for handling
all this, something like expect, <http://expect.nist.gov/>, or DejaGnu,
<http://www.gnu.org/software/dejagnu/>, should instead be used for this
task, but I have no experience with these.  Is someone interested in
working on that?


Regards,
 Thomas

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