On Sat, Sep 27, 2003 at 08:56:54PM +0200, Matthias Urlichs wrote: > Hi, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > What you are overlooking is that the main bug causing build failures for > > gnucash is NOT architecture specific; rather, the potential for a build > > failure appears to exist on all architectures, but the use of a > > *pseudo*-RNG for generating test data tends to result in certain corner > > cases being reliably hit in some build environments, and reliably missed > > in others. > ... or not. In fact, the bug says quite clearly that the test currently > passes on x86 _only_ because it does 200 iterations of <whatever>, and > increasing that number makes it fail on iteration 244. :-( > Interestingly (also stated in bug 192101), it seems to work on RedHat. Quite so. Red Hat is a build environment where 'make check' succeeds, though the bug is latent. Debian i386 is a build environment where 'make check' succeeds, though the bug is latent. On other Debian architectures, the bug causes a build failure, due to differences in the output of the PRNG. Eliminating the randomness, it's probably possible to construct valid test input that fails on all platforms, Red Hat included. So either the test itself is wrong for allowing these input values, or there's a bug in gnucash. Note that at any point, this bug could be effectively downgraded by removing the call to 'make check' from debian/rules, if it was decided that the impact of this bug on the program's viability is not significant. That's a decision for the maintainer to make, however; it's certainly justified to be wary of *any* failures where financial software is concerned. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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