Re: [Axiom-developer] new problem compiling wh-sandbox, rev 470 (urgent...)

[Waldek Hebisch]

Martin Rubey wrote:
Waldek Hebisch <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > But I must admit that I saw quite a few weird build problems -- most of the
> > time problem went away re-running make but some were repeatable.
> 
> Oh dear. So, why doesn't this happen with "GoldenAxiom"? Is the new build
> procedure more sensitive to sloppy programming bugs?
>

I belive that Gold really has the same problems.  To tigger rarely occuring
bugs one have to vary parameters.  Since Gold is essentially frozen
there is probably not enough variation to see such bugs during
build.  But we do have bug reports about "System error", so I would
say that get weird errors at runtime.

Also, on my main test machines Gold does not build (it builds after small
changes, but then it is not Gold any more).  It is possible that only
few people build Axiom on machines which are likely to have such
problems

FYI I noticed first problems few months ago, working on small variation
of build-improvements.  I first thought that the problem is with
test machines (it is still one possibility that I consider).  But
since later I tracked similar problems to real bugs I now think that
we probably have more such bugs.

> Well, meanwhile I was able to build most of axiom by building and installing
> GCL (from build-improvements) separately. Before that, I almost consistently
> got the error about missing ALIST.o. Might that help to track down the bug?
> 

Missing ALIST.o typically means error during compilation.  The error
may be in compilation of ALIST.spad (which is already too general
to be useful), but it may be also in some other file: bootstrap compiles
files in special order (to satisfy dependencies), but errors are
discovered only during copy (which works in alphabltical order).

So one really has to look at trace to find out what happened.

> However, now the build stops in guess-pkg: FAMR2.NRLIB/code.o is missing.
> 
> Looking at trace, the problem seens to start in SUPEXPR, I get a "non 
> extending
> category" message there, albeit without any error message.

I think this is normal



> The next domain
> which is compiled is FAMR2, and there it says 
> 
> System error:
> Cannot create the file FAMR2.erlib/index.KAF.
> 

The only regularity I see is that your problems involve system calls.

-- 
                              Waldek Hebisch
address@hidden