RFC: conditionalize tests on presence of new ndbm methods

[Gedare Bloom]

On Mon, Jul 29, 2019 at 4:03 PM Chris Johns <chrisj at rtems.org> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
This is a good point. Maybe we can somehow buffer the need for
toolchain updates (using conditionals) to some frequency
(monthly/quarterly).

Gedare