RFC: conditionalize tests on presence of new ndbm methods

[Chris Johns]

On 30/7/19 7:43 am, Gedare Bloom wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 25, 2019 at 6:34 AM Joel Sherrill <joel at rtems.org> wrote:
>>
>> Hi
>>
>> I am in the middle of building tools with a newlib bump to include the ndbm addition. When I commit the patch which adds a test, builds with older toolsets will break.
>>
>> I think I should conditionalize the test on the presence of one of the new methods.
>>
>> Thoughts?
>>
> How long do you leave the condition in? 

Good question and I do not have an answer.

> at first I thought this is OK,
> but generally we accept that a patch on master can cause a need to
> update toolchain. As long as the toolchain patch is upstreamed or
> available via RSB git-pull, I think it is fine to let older toolsets
> break. One should generally expect to rebuild their toolchain after
> git-pull of master anyway.

It was very handy I did not need to build matching tools to bisect rtems.git to
find the commit that broken the RPi. I was lucky in this case as I did not need
to change tools. If I had to manually build the tools to match each rtems.git
commit being tested the task that took about an hour overall would have extended
out to days. Automation of a bisect would help.

Chris