[cdt-test-dev] Test plan additions, etc.

[Jeremy Handcock <handcock@xxxxxxxxxx>]

As promised, here are a few additions to the system test plan to make. 
More may follow later.

Adoptability: A scenario that I have recently added to our internal test 
plan fits well here.  It involves checking out the public sources for 
the PostgreSQL database (an open-source RDBMS that Red Hat actively 
contributes to) and building it.  It is a medium-sized C project that 
uses autoconf, so the scenario also involves external tools in the build 
process (ie. run configure before make).  Defects that are problematic 
for this scenario (and to be considered as barriers to adoption):

(1) If one specifies a non-default build command 'x', the CDT will 
attempt to run variations on 'x clean all' upon build/rebuild because it 
assumes that 'x' is some kind of targeted build tool with 'clean' and 
'all' targets.  This has been filed under PR 
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=25979.

(2) File permissions and timestamps are not preserved upon importing 
from the file system.  If I import PostgreSQL sources from the 
filesystem, the 'configure' script loses its executable bit.  The loss 
of timestamps causes issues with make's method of using timestamps to 
determine what needs to be rebuilt.  This has been filed under PR 
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=25387.  This is not 
specifically a CDT problem (more an eclipse platform one), but it is 
certainly related to CDT adoptability.

(3) Cannot abort a build.  I found this to be an especially painful 
problem when doing large builds, whether with make, a non-default build 
command, or some defined external tool builder.  This has been moved 
from our internal bugzilla to an eclipse.org PR: 
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=41752

Documentation: Please add Mike Behm (mbehm@xxxxxxxxxx) as a 
documentation reviewer under the documentation section.  You may add his 
name/email to the list of Red Hat contacts as well.  Mike is the Red Hat 
technical writer responsible for the CDT docs, and has been offering 
documentation feedback through the cdt-doc-dev mailing list.

Usability: As stated in my previous posting, I have some great usability 
feedback from a fellow Hatter that I'd like to make public somewhere. 
I'm not sure if this would be an appropriate place... any thoughts?

Jeremy

--
Jeremy Handcock <handcock@xxxxxxxxxx>
Red Hat Canada, Toronto