Re: DejaGnu structured logs

On 8/29/25 10:47 PM, Jacob Bachmeyer wrote:

> There is an option for XML logs that is currently a bit "half-baked" 
> and, as far as I can tell, what it 
   Sorry about that, I'm probably the only one that ever used it. The 
entire idea of the .sum files was so the output could be easily diff'd, 
XML potentially being somewhat better cause at least it was structured. 
The idea of using a JSON file is probably better than fixing the minimal 
XML support. Or support both.
> There are plans to radically overhaul XML support for the DejaGnu 1.7 
> release.  There is some preliminary code on the "psql" branch but I am 
> unsure if that code will ultimately be merged or prove to
   That was never really finished obviously, it was an experiment, which 
is why it's still in a branch. Personally I think a database would be 
much better than piles of text files in any format. The XML files (or 
JSON) could be imported was the idea.
> All that said, once the infrastructure for the revised XML support is 
> complete, reusing it to also produce .sum.json files would be 
> relatively simple, really only a matter of output syntax.  (Note that 
> that would mean the resulting JSON structure would mirror the XML tree 
> structure.)
   Sounds good to me.
> For example, the currently planned major highlight for 1.6.4 will be a 
> rewritten table-driven default_target_compile because that procedure 
> is teetering on the edge of "BigBallOfMud" unmaintainability.

  Life maintaining a 35 year old program... Design "decisions" made in 
the early years were never really designed, just cranked out because we 
we desperately needed it for testing so we could do supported quarterly 
releases. Cross testing to embedded systems was very experimental at the 
time, the era of SRECs, 9600 baud serial ports, and debug ROM monitors. 
Refactoring the target support is probably a good idea since the 
technology has changed considerably.

> I don't know how much maintenance DejaGNU is getting these days
>
   DejaGnu has always suffered from lack of funding for any maintenance, 
unlike the rest of the toolchain. Post Cygnus Support, any work on 
DejaGnu has been voluntary. I think there has also been a bit of the 
"don't break the test results", which discourages development beyond 
critical bug fixing. I'd be nice to see a little more support to fix and 
improve long-standing problems. I'm actually surprised nobody wrote a 
replacement.

     - rob -

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