DWARF/Ada testsuite

This repository hosts a tiny testsuite to check various properties of the DWARF debug information that GCC generates for Ada programs in minimal GNAT encodings mode (-fgnat-encodings=minimal).

I wrote this testsuite to help me developing and maintaining GCC patches for Ada DWARF debug info.

Running

First, make sure that which python yields a Python 2 setup that has the pyelftools package installed. Then, just run:

./run.py

This will run all testcases in the tests directory and display on the standard output whether they succeeded or failed. If they failed, an error message is displayed.

It is possible to run just several specific testcases. For instance:

$ ./run.py tests/fixedpoint tests/record_subtype
Using compiler: /usr/bin/gcc
OK:    tests/fixedpoint
OK:    tests/record_subtype

If you want to use this testsuite during GCC development, it is possible to make it use the gnat1 executable directly, which is handy as you don’t have to build the whole GCC project. Note that you’ll need a minimal runtime to do that (if not, gnat1 will complain about missing system.ads). Just run:

./run.py --gnat1=/path/to/your/gnat1

How about the GCC testsuite?

I’m not very familiar with TCL/DejaGNU and writing tests that do more than checking text outputs with this technology looks hard. Writing pyelftools-based testcases was much more easier, faster and more reliable so that’s what I did when I worked on GCC’s DWARF output.

While my long term plan is to port these testcases to the official GCC testsuite, this is going to require a lot of work, so in the meantime there is this repository. :-)