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.
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. Now only one of these bugs bit me, and bit me hard, and that's how I discovered the whole thing. I manually ran a bunch of the testcases in the gcc testsuite, and I already found 15 bugs active there. But running of all them by hand is difficult and painful, but I don't see how to do that automatically on the system's compiler from the testsuite's documentation. My ultimate goal is to evaluate to which extend I can trust this compiler, and use these results to convince my management that we're most probably going to face a lot more trouble if we continue using a compiler that's containing known bugs. Is it possible to run the testsuite on the system's compiler ? I've seen that some of the testcases might not be relevant as they're trying to check some of gcc's new features that might not be in that old version. Or would there be another, simpler testsuite I could run natively ? Thanks! -- Nicolas Noble
