[llvm-dev] FileCheck

Thu Jun 18 10:37:37 PDT 2020

The thing I use normally only shows the first N lines by default (I don’t know off hand what N is). Honestly, I don’t feel very strongly about the specific order, but it’s not useful when somebody proposes something on the list, and nobody voices any dissent (choosing instead to silently oppose the change). My requests would be:

  1.  The order should be customizable via command line.
  2.  By default, it should not dump things to multiple locations. If I ask for verbose output, I want to get blasted with all the stuff.
  3.  The most important thing for me personally is to see the input to filecheck (I realize that this is in conflict with my earlier point. It’s early and I hadn’t had my coffee 😊 ). When I get a failure I want to be able to reproduce it in an IDE to use a debugger. Any change should not make this use case harder.

Personally, I do not find the argument that the defaults should be setup to be best for newcomers to be very compelling; we are talking about changing the behavior of a non-default option after all. If just a bare filecheck invocation doesn’t tell a newcomer what they need to know, then they have to do filecheck -help or google the documentation anyways. At that point, they are going to customize it however they want. I assume anybody using filecheck to debug an issue is tech savvy enough to be able to configure the options, given reasonable documentation.

Thanks,
   Christopher Tetreault

From: Sjoerd Meijer <Sjoerd.Meijer at arm.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2020 9:45 AM
To: Chris Tetreault <ctetreau at quicinc.com>
Cc: llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Subject: [EXT] Re: [llvm-dev] FileCheck

I would guess that in a CI system the order doesn't matter much because you look at a webpage? I looked at some build bots today/yesterday that now also show this, and yeah, it's fine either way, I was guessing.

My primary use-case is usage in a terminal, and displaying the errors first followed by all input makes this pretty unusable.
________________________________
From: Chris Tetreault <ctetreau at quicinc.com<mailto:ctetreau at quicinc.com>>
Sent: 18 June 2020 17:34
To: Sjoerd Meijer <Sjoerd.Meijer at arm.com<mailto:Sjoerd.Meijer at arm.com>>
Cc: llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>>
Subject: RE: [llvm-dev] FileCheck

For anybody viewing these failures through some sort of CI system, showing the error first then the input file is more useful for the same reasons you mentioned. Personally, I rarely run filecheck by hand from the command prompt, so your change would make my life worse. Granted, I’m just one person.

The point I’m trying to make is that I don’t think it’s clear-cut which order is better, so maybe we shouldn’t change it. I think it might be fine to add an option to swap the order, but I’d be very sad if it started dumping to some random file by default.

Thanks,

   Christopher Tetreault

From: llvm-dev <llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev-bounces at lists.llvm.org>> On Behalf Of Sjoerd Meijer via llvm-dev
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2020 9:16 AM
To: llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org<mailto:llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org>
Subject: [EXT] [llvm-dev] FileCheck

Hello,

I am not sold on FileCheck's new behaviour. For failing tests in verbose mode, it first dump the actual error messages, followed by the annotated input file to FileCheck. The result is I can't immediately see error messages if the input is more than just a few lines long, so I have to scroll all the way up to see the errors, then down again, etc.

I do see some advantages of dumping the input to FileCheck, but an improvement for me would be:

  *   to dump the input first, then followed by the error message, so that I can the errors first, and then decide to scroll up if I am interested to do so.
  *   dump it to a separate file (controlled with an option).

I am interested in changing the behaviour, because I think I find setting environment varibale "FILECHECK_OPTS="--dump-input never"" inconvenient.

My 2 pennies.

Sjoerd.
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