Re: [Bug-dejagnu] Apology

[Rob Savoye]

Reuben Thomas wrote:

> for GNU Zile 2.3.1, in which I described DejaGnu as "DejaGnu proved to
> be insufficiently portable, and too flaky", was rather rude. I agree.
> I'm sorry if I caused any offense.

  Dejagnu is insanely portable, and runs on dozens of systems, both
natively and cross. Flaky I don't know about, but obscure and overly
complex comes to mind. Good cross testing of toolchains is actually a
difficult problem, which made things somewhat complicated, plus DejaGnu
was developed while also using also it for toolchain testing for release
at Cygnus.

> design flaws, but by a combination of lack of portability (as I also
> said) and by flakiness in the underlying expect/tcl combination. I'm
> sorry I didn't make that clear.

  Tcl has become unmaintained, and expect not much better. Course this
is 18 years after DejaGnu was written. If I ever did it again, I'd
probably use Python, but that would be a big project, and there aren't
the resources (funding and bodies) to do that in a way that wouldn't
cause problems in GNU toolchain testing. I still use DejaGnu on many,
many systems with my current projects, and haven't really seen any
portability problems, so I'm curious what platform you were on, and what
your problems were.

        - rob -