Re: [GNU Autoconf 2.63] testsuite: 147 339 340 failed - problem resolved

[Eric Blake]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

[adding bug-m4]

According to Bruce Dugan on 12/1/2008 1:19 AM:

Hi Bruce,

> This problem has been resolved. I traced the errors to m4. The README
> for m4 stated that the libsigsegv libraries were optional. Apparently
> for Mac OS 10.5 they are not.

I'm glad that using libsigsegv seemed to resolve your problem.  However,
the presence of libsigsegv is supposed to be optional: its presence should
only affect behavior on the corner case of stack overflow, and not normal
runs where m4 is expected to run to completion.  I seriously doubt that it
was the recompilation of m4 that changed your results, and suspect that
you could still get the autoconf testsuite to pass even without a
libsigsegv-enabled m4.

But in looking further at your log, I seriously doubt that it was m4, and
rather, it was an intermittent OS bug that you ran into.  All three of
your reported failures look somewhat like this:

./torture.at:31: $at_diff "state-ls.before" "state-ls.after"
- --- /dev/null 2008-11-30 21:13:21.000000000 -0800
+++
/Users/bruce/OSF_GNU_Software/LIVES-src_and_lib/LIVES-prereqs/autoconf/autoconf-2.63/tests/testsuite.dir/at-groups/147/stdout
2008-11-30 21:13:21.000000000 -0800
@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+--- state-ls.before    2008-11-30 21:13:21.000000000 -0800
++++ state-ls.after     2008-11-30 21:13:21.000000000 -0800
+@@ -5,3 +5,4 @@
+ configure.ac
+ install-sh
+ testsuite.log
++testsuite.log

This is the comparison of two compared directory listings, where one of
the two listings shows testsuite.log twice.  In other words, you are
tickling a well-known Mac bug where readdir() sometimes returns the same
file more than once, which breaks the diff.  I'm wondering if we should
beef up the autoconf testsuite to filter ls output through uniq in order
to quit tickling this Mac bug, as there have been quite a few reports of
autoconf testsuite failures due to this rather unrelated OS bug.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (Cygwin)
Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iEYEARECAAYFAkkz5qUACgkQ84KuGfSFAYB8fACeLt6H4pWrtaMn2gGvU0zcaWn8
qp0AnjB9b0r+F5cRAO1ykuK4YVV5HzwQ
=5hDE
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----