[fpc-devel] Alternative parsers

[Florian Klaempfl]

Am 19.10.2010 12:18, schrieb Graeme Geldenhuys:
> 
> Like I've said a million times before, the management of the FPC project
> seems a bit off (sorry if this offends some of you, don't take it
> personally). Hardly anybody looks at the various branches, so to truly test
> something new

Indeed, it's just a matter of time which seems nobody to have, see e.g.
cpstrnew branch: very few people test, nobody contributes or why is
compilation broken? Even more it even doesn't affect the compiler, the
rtl needs fixing, we need tests etc. Where are the fixes and enhancments
for the rtl? Where are the tests?

> a workflow similar to the git.git repository needs to be
> adopted.

It has nothing to do with workflow.

> spare time, and the git development is a 1000x faster than FPC's, with
> hundreds of contributors.

See above about the cpstrnew branch. But if git helps a lot, where can I
pull the fixes to the cpstrnew branch? Where are the other git
repositories containing the great patches to FPC? You maintain your git
mirror already for years, there must be some cloned repositories and
forks with a lot of contributions. I guess a lot of it could go into
trunk, git format-patch -XX together with svn-apply makes this really
easy, just tell me the git urls ;)

> 
> 
>> Also refactoring because of personal preferences, aesthetics or 
>> new design patterns or paradigms must be handled very carefully
> 
> Yes, there goal is normally to make code more manageable and easier
> understood by others - indirectly making contributions easier.

See cpstrnew branch, it has nothing to do with the compiler, the rtl
needs fixing.

> 
> 
>> There is a big 
>> danger of degrading the stability by such changes which are not planned 
>> by the core developers.
> 
> That is what unit testing frameworks where designed for. Unit test the
> compiler code, so there is no surprises and no guessing required to know if
> something broke something else or not. FPC has some tests, but I have no
> idea how extensive they are. 

For the compiler they are very extensive, not for the rtl/packages/fcl.


> Last time I looked at the various tests
> results published on the web (I can't remember that URL of the top of my
> head), 

http://www.freepascal.org/testsuite/cgi-bin/testsuite.cgi

> the outcome looks rather sad - with many many failed tests. I'm not
> sure of all those failures were false negatives though.

Some tests are just added to remember that something is broken.
Actually, what we do are regression testing. Newly broken stuff must be
fixed immediatly, tests which worked never before will be fixed if possible.