Re: Apology

On Tue, 24 Feb 2009, Rob Savoye wrote:

> 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.

I had Nelson Beebe building Zile on about 30 different systems, and on 
some, e.g. Mac OS X, DejaGnu wouldn't work.

>  Tcl has become unmaintained, and expect not much better.

Tcl seems to have received a lot of attention recently, so perhaps there's 
hope there.

I'm sorry, I forget the exact details of my last problem, which was to do 
with detecting processes finishing, or perhaps killing them, but when I read 
up on it it seemed to be something I couldn't reliably fix in Tcl.

I also spent ages trying to get around timing problems with ncurses. I did 
in the end solve this reliably, but the tests still ran slowly, as waiting 
for the test processes to exit took time. In the end rewriting the entire 
test suite not to use DejaGnu took about the same time as solving that 
problem had, and ended up with one less build-time dependency, and a test 
suite that ran much faster, and was simpler to write tests for (because I 
could write most of them in Emacs Lisp rather than having to program them 
interactively).

I don't doubt that if I had more programs which needed interactive testing 
and which were perhaps not using ncurses or didn't have the natural 
extensibility of an Emacs-like editor, then it would indeed be more natural 
to use DejaGnu; I just had a particular set of circumstances in which that 
didn't, in the end, seem to be the best way.

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