[PPL-devel] ppl-0.10.2 check thorough test fail

[David Fang]

Hi,
 	Adding fink-devel.

> On 03/29/11 02:39, David Fang wrote:
>> With ppl-0.10.2, several Mac OS X fink users (including myself) have 
>> observed the following single test failure on 10.5 and 10.6, using Apple's 
>> gcc-4.2, arch i686-apple-darwin{9,10}, with thorough tests enabled:
>> 
>> /usr/bin/grep -E "^Optimum value: " ../../../demos/ppl_lpsol/expected_mpz
>>> expected_optima && /usr/bin/grep -E "^Optimum value: " obtained 
>>> obtained_optima && diff -u expected_optima obtained_optima
>> --- expected_optima 2011-03-22 21:05:58.000000000 -0400
>> +++ obtained_optima 2011-03-22 21:05:58.000000000 -0400
>> 
>> Most fink users that reported this have built ppl against gmp-4.3.2.
>> I tested a build against gmp-5.0.1 and got the exact same result on
>> i686-apple-darwin10.
>> 
>> However, the same set of tests (check thorough) pass *cleanly* on
>> powerpc-apple-darwin8 apple-gcc-4.0.1 (ppl-0.10.2 using gmp-4.3.2),
>> which took over 4 days to run.
>
> yes, `make check' is heavy.  However, our experience suggests no tests
> in the regression test suite is really redundant.
>
>> Has anyone else observed this failure on this version/configuration?
>
> Not that I know, but it would be useful to know the compiler version
> used.  In the (rather distant) past I remember some users had problems
> with some Apple-modified versions of GCC.

Compiler version:
apple-gcc-4.2.1
configured for i686-apple-darwin10

An interesting data point we could use is powerpc-apple-darwin9-gcc-4.2.1, 
which uses the same version compiler, but different arch.
(Any fink-10.5/ppc volunteers willing to donate some CPU cycles to test 
this? : "fink -m build ppl" )

>> How severe is this test failure?
>
> I would consider it severe, as it might indicate that the PPL has been
> miscompiled.  This is my first suspect.  Of course, we cannot exclude
> the cause is an architecture/compiler/platform-dependent bug in
> PPL 0.10.2 that went undetected up to now: perhaps `git bisect' could
> help locating it.

It is posible this was never covered earlier, in my packaging, I had to 
apply a tiny patch to name an anonymous enum that prevented gcc-4.0.x from 
compiling one of the headers.  At some point the documentation said 
gcc-4.0 was not supported, but my testing on powerpc-darwin8 was 
successful.)

>> (Unrelated note: ppl-0.11's tests run cleanly on i686-darwin10.)
>
> PPL 0.11.2 is the latest version of the PPL and the one we warmly
> recommend to anyone.  If for some reason you cannot switch to PPL
> 0.11.2, please try compiling PPL 0.10.2 with a different compiler and
> see if the problem persists.  If it does, we may investigate other
> possibilities.

According to Jack Howarth (on this list, I believe), gcc-4.4 depends on 
ppl-0.10.x and is incompatible with ppl-0.11.x.

Thank you for the reply.

Fang


David Fang
http://www.csl.cornell.edu/~fang/
http://www.achronix.com/