GNU Parallel Bug Reports [parallel] parallel-20110205 hangs in "make check" step

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

I routinely build packages in our test lab on about 25 flavors of
Unix, and GNU parallel has been one of the more successful.  

However, in looking at the logs from yesterday's parallel-20110205
builds, I found a number of systems (Mac OS X Intel and PowerPC,
GNU/Linux IA-32, PowerPC and SPARC, ...)  where the "make check" step
hangs.  This morning, I killed a fair number of make, sem, and perl
processes on the various systems where the builds did not complete.

Here are two examples from a manual build attempt this morning,
with PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:

        Mac OS X Intel:
                ./sem --fg --id pod2html rm -f ./pod2htm*
                [no further progress, and no CPU time being used]

        GNU/Linux SPARC:
                ./sem --fg --id pod2html pod2html ./niceload > ./niceload.html
                [no further progress, and no CPU time being used]

I finally typed ^c, and then "make check", and tests completed.

On both systems, I then did

        make distclean
        env CC=cc ./configure && make all check

and this time, the Mac OS X system completed successfully, but the
GNU/Linux SPARC box hung at

        ./sem --fg --id pod2html rm -f ./pod2htm*

A third attempt on that system was finally successful in completing
the tests.

I then went back and looked at the build logs for parallel-20110122,
and found that I had to do "kill -HUP" on builds for Mac OS X PowerPC
and Intel, and for GNU/Linux IA-64.

It looks like there is a Heisenbug here, one of the banes of parallel
programming.

Any ideas as to what is happening, and how it might be fixed so that
GNU parallel builds flawlessly everywhere?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: address@hidden  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       address@hidden  address@hidden -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------