My last commit message (for commit 0df4e30) contained the following paragraph concerning intermittent Ada example build failures during various comprehensive tests that I encountered:
"These checks showed intermittent failures for certain parts (xtraditional28a, xtraditional33a) of the Ada part of the build with two separate complaints about various files written by the gnat compiler. At this stage I cannot figure out the source of this issue since it comes and goes and is hard to reproduce. But at one point I got through the entire test above without Ada failures, and found an obvious issue with the static OCaml binding library which I fixed and which has absolutely nothing to do with Ada. I then tried the test above again, which failed for the nondynamic case for the build of one of the Ada examples. I then followed up by a specific static build of the ocaml binding library that exercised the fixed build-system CMake code for that case, and all was well. Therefore, I think from these piecemeal results that all is well with the current commit, but further testing needs to be done as above once I figure out the source of the intermittent Ada build errors." One possibility to explain intermittent failures like this is some hardware issue. But after the above result I hammered my box with all sorts of hardware tests which it passed with flying colours. Part of those tests involved a system reboot, and after that the comprehensive test that previously was failing in different places due to different Ada example build issues on successive runs completed with perfect results! Which is a nice result since it confirms the intrusive changes I made for commit 0df4e30 are valid. Furthermore, because the Ada results were perfect for this comprehensive test after a reboot, and many prior tests except for the ones used for this particular commit for a Linux operating system that had been up for a long time, there is a possibility that the gnatmake issue on Linux is it becomes unreliable if the Linux platform is up too long. So those good hardware tests, the good Ada example builds (and all other builds and tests) that occurred in the comprehensive test *after* a reboot, and the intermittent failures before the reboot just for this commit occurring just for Ada example builds argues strongly these intermittent failures are not due to hardware issues. So that leaves some issue with one or all of the components (gnatlink, etc.) of my system gnatmake Ada build tool or the software stack those components depend on as the likely culprit for the intermittent Ada example build failures in this case. And one possibility is the Linux kernel itself was beginning to get wonky after many days up, and gnatmake is peculiarly sensitive to such issues. Anyhow, if you combine that bad gnatmake experience on Linux with Arjen's known difficulties with gnatmake on Cygwin and Jerry's known difficulties with gnatmake on Mac OS X, I get the impression that gnatmake is pretty unreliable regardless of platform (perhaps through no fault of its own other than possibly a design that depends on the underlying operating system working perfectly). Anyhow, the observed gnatmake unreliability is something to keep in mind going forward for those of you who run into issues with gnatmake. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
