Re: support for calling Linux syscalls directly

[chrubis at suse dot cz]

Hi!
> > > LTP is a very special case. It's a test suite for the kernel API/ABI,
> > > so of course it needs to be aware of (and testing!) these differences
> > > to make sure nobody breaks them (which would in turn break glibc).
> > 
> > And everyone who wanted to write such a testsuite as well would have
> > the same needs, and duplicate.
> 
> Of course two different test suites duplicate a lot of work - namely
> all of the assertions they're testing. That's the whole point. If they
> shared their code, they wouldn't really be any better than a single
> test suite at finding bugs. The fact that multiple independently
> developed test suites reach the same conclusion that everything is
> working right is the whole reason for believing the software being
> tested actually works.

But in reality I often end up with several testcases broken the same way
because they shared common ancestors and were copied all over with just
a slight modification. Complicated pieces of code are simply not worth
of duplication. I would rather have single place where I can fix bug in
way how syscall done because this code is complicated enough and does
exactly the same work in each project.

There are, on the other hand, duplications that makes sense because the
resulting projects have different objectives. In LTP posix conformance
tests overlaps fairly with libc tests, which is fine.

-- 
Cyril Hrubis
chrubis@suse.cz