Many thanks to Alexander Schiffer, Petr Leiman and Stephen Cusack for drawing our attention to this problem and supplying test cases to reproduce it. It was an obscure problem in which a Phaser executable compiled on a 32-bit Linux system would occasionally (but not reproducibly) crash when run on a 64-bit Linux system. Because the CCP4 binary distribution for Linux is compiled on a 32-bit machine, this potentially affected anyone using that distribution on a 64-bit machine.
David Waterman at CCP4 did some brilliant detective work and, with some help from Airlie McCoy, figured out how to make an executable that doesn't crash. David has now noted the issue on the CCP4 problems page (http://www.ccp4.ac.uk/problems.php#6.2.0-phaser), which has a link to where you can download the fixed executable. The fixed executable is now also incorporated into the automated download. We do pretty exhaustive tests, but they don't include compiling on one architecture and testing on another, so if everyone had suffered in silence we would never have been aware of this problem! So we (and, I'm sure, other developers) really do appreciate bug reports. Best wishes, Randy Read ----- Randy J. Read Department of Haematology, University of Cambridge Cambridge Institute for Medical Research Tel: +44 1223 336500 Wellcome Trust/MRC Building Fax: +44 1223 336827 Hills Road E-mail: rj...@cam.ac.uk Cambridge CB2 0XY, U.K. www-structmed.cimr.cam.ac.uk
