crash and test failures with 1.8.1

[Dan McMahill]

Hello,

I posted most of this to guile-user but realized it is more of a 
bug/developer issue...

I've managed to get guile-1.8.1 to build (with a few patches) on my 
NetBSD/alpha system.  Now I'm trying to investigate some failing tests. 
 The first failing test is:

Running numbers.test
FAIL: numbers.test: max: big / real: (= big*5 (max big*5 -inf.0))
FAIL: numbers.test: max: real / big: (= big*5 (max -inf.0 big*5))
FAIL: numbers.test: min: big / real: (= big*5 (min big*5 +inf.0))
FAIL: numbers.test: min: real / big: (= big*5 (min +inf.0 big*5))

and then later:


Running r4rs.test
[1]   Segmentation fault      ${dir}${tst}
FAIL: check-guile

There is one other which will cause a segfault and then some others 
which run but do not pass the test.

At this point, I have two questions.

1)  Is there a more or less simple way to step through the tests in an 
interactive mode where I can get to the failures in numbers.test to 
really see what values are involved and causing the failure?   I'm 
guessing that either I'm seeing an artifact of alphas being 64-bit 
systems or that alphas may deal differently with IEEE math and things 
like Inf and NaN.  FWIW, a friend tried this on a linux x86_64 system 
and also saw the numbers.test failure.

2)  Is there a simple way to get the r4rs.test to run in the debugger so 
I can either track this down myself or provide some more useful feedback?

I have a handful of patches to get guile-1.8.1 to build on 
solaris-2.9/sparc as well and I'm failing some tests there too.  I'll 
try to clean up the patches I have and get them sent in.

Thanks
-Dan