Simplifier tests (was Re: patch applied (testsuite): Add a new category of "eyeball" tests)

[Don Stewart]

simonmarhaskell:
> Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> >I'm all for this, if Roman and/or Don care to help -- thank you!  A 
> >little readme to explain how to add a new test would be good.
> 
> The testsuite is well documented on the wiki:
> 
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/RunningTests
> 
> >Ian and/or Simon may want to comment on dependencies, or technology (eg 
> >Haskell vs Python).
> 
> To do this in Haskell would mean adding (back) regex support to the boot 
> libraries.  Well, currently you can do a testsuite run with the boot libs, 
> in theory the testsuite could have additional dependencies, but it makes 
> things simpler if we keep boot deps == testsuite deps.

Oh, didn't Ian have a purely Haskell regex implementation? We could just
drop that module into the testsuite -- rather than adding yet more
python.

Ian, is that still around?

> I'm not completely against adding packages to the boot set, but very extra 
> package increases the validation time, which is something we're sensitive 
> to.
> 
> I'd be inclined to do this in Python, unless it really is too painful.

I just notice that we always regret choosing scripting languages in the
long run, as the code grows and changes :)

-- Don