William Stein wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 1:22 AM, Dr. David
> Kirkby<[email protected]> wrote:
>> I've noticed a couple of issues on Solaris, where it appears packages
>> have been installed properly (the $SAGE_HOME/spkg/installed/foobar is
>> created), but this has not actually happened.
>>
>> On one occasion 'cp -a' was called, which failed to copy files to
>> $SAGE_HOME/local/include, as '-a' is not an option on Solaris to the cp
>> command. Sun's 'cp' reported this as an error, but this did not cause
>> the 'make' to stop.
>
> After every single command in spkg-install one *must* check the error
> return value. That's why there is code like the following all over in
> them:
>
> if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
> echo "blah went wrong"
> exit 1
> fi
>
> Anywhere such code doesn't happen is a bug.
Well, there are a lot of bugs then, as a lot of code I see does not
check every command. Checking at the end does not work.
I just looked at one random package I've never looked at before -
(numpy-1.3.0.p1]
This contains:
cp ../patches/gnu.py numpy/distutils/fcompiler/gnu.py
cp ../patches/__init__.py numpy/distutils/fcompiler/__init__.py
There are no checks. There is a check later:
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "Error building numpy."
exit 1
fi
but that does not help, as the following script I wrote shows.
#!/bin/sh
# Try to do something which will fail as non-root
touch /this-should-fail
pwd
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "This script failed"
exit 1
fi
the 'touch' command gives an error, but the message "This script failed"
is *not* printed, as the 'pwd' command later succeeded. If I remove the
'pwd' command, so it prints the error message.
Writing
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
echo "This script failed"
exit 1
fi
after every single command in spkg-install would make the code very long,
>> It would be a good idea when creating new .spkg files that one actually
>> checks that at least a subset of the files that are supposed to be
>> installed in $SAGE_HOME/local, actually are installed - preferably all
>> of them if possible.
>>
>> Comments?
>
> That won't necessarily "prove" anything, since e.g., on doing an
> upgrade the files might appear to be installed, but in fact old
> versions are installed.
>
> William
True, but it might go some way. Perhaps modification times could be used
in some way.
I don't claim to know a complete foolproof solution (fools are very
resourceful), but it's clear that there are things going wrong which are
not being noticed. With a log file of 20 MB or more, its not easy for a
human to look for the errors.
In Solaris, any time a package is installed with the pkgadd command, a
record is kept of the checksum of every file, the permissions of the
file so it is possible to determine if something has changed. I don't
know if it's practical to do similar in Sage.
It's very clear to me not every error in Sage is being caught during the
installation.
dave
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