[Lldb-commits] [PATCH] D40616: ObjectFileELF: Add support for compressed sections

[Davide Italiano via lldb-commits]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 1:38 PM, Jim Ingham <jingham at apple.com> wrote:
> I'm a little confused by your response.
>
> My stated objection to command output dependent tests is and has always been that they make the test dependent on the details of command output.  Over time doing so makes it hard to modify command output.  This is sort of related to interactivity, in the sense that since lldb is an interactive tool with lots of different commands producing different reports of information we can gather, the desire to improve and modify that output is more present than in tools that are less output dependent or whose output is meant to be processed, in which case it really is API.  Command output for lldb is explicitly NOT API, that's why we have a real API for people who want to program lldb...  So the bad effect of the tests in calcifying this output is an issue for lldb where it may not be for other tools.
>

Hi Jim,
in my experience command output changes can be automated via `sed/grep/awk`.
I'm responsible (and many others are) for fundamental changes in LLVM
tools output (i.e. typeless pointers changed pretty much every
load/store/memory_op* in tree) and I found out changing the output of
tests isn't that troublesome. I'm not yet very familiar with LLDB, so
the story might be different here.
I'm personally in favour of this approach because it scaled very well
in llvm (and lld, FWIW), with many more tests than lldb has.

--
Davide