On 09/19/09 18:14, Nicolas Noble wrote:
Hello,
Long story short, I'm looking for a way to test a distribution's
compiler by running the latest gcc testsuite on it, but so far, I've
only seem to run it on the same gcc sourcetree it's on. I actually
wonder if it's possible and/or relevant to do this on the
distribution's compiler.
It's certainly possible. Under the hood the Makefile just invokes
runtest. I don't think people do this that often anymore, so you might
have to set some environment variables and/or set some paths, but when
it's all said and done you can probably do something like
cd <gcc sources>/gcc/testsuite
runtest --tool=gcc
runtest --tool=g++
Which should run the gcc & g++ testsuites with your system compiler.
My problem resides in RedHat's gcc (which version seems to be gcc
(GCC) 4.1.2 20071124 (Red Hat 4.1.2-42)). I recently discovered that
this compiler hosts a bunch of known gcc bugs that have been reported
and fixed in the gcc mainstream, but it seems the bugfixes never got
ported back in RedHat's.
The fact of the matter is that every compiler has bugs. Backporting
every bugfix to old releases isn't practical, particularly if the fix
has the potential to introduce new regressions. It's a balancing act
our engineers deal with daily. Customers (of course) have input into
how we balance those decisions, and if you are a customer I would
strongly encourage you to file a bug report with Red Hat.
Jeff
