Re: GNU make 3.81beta4 released

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Markus Mauhart" <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 00:55:46 +0100
> 
> I have interesting results.
> 
> 1st the "hang": I found it happens (the mentioned loop loops forever)
> cause it thinks that the single goal's ("all") dependencies are building.
> Inside the loop the following stack IIRC fails:
> reap_children()
>   process_wait_for_any()
>     process_wait_for_any_private()
>       failed = WaitForMultipleObjects(too much handles)
>       return NULL
>     return NULL
>   doesnt propagate the error correctly.
> loop loops again
> 
> Then I added array-overflow handling to process_register() and according
> failure handling to its callers.
> 
> Now I got immediately an exception (probably the same one I reported
> previously for non-hanging "mode 2").
> 
> Reason is a bug in process_last_err(x) ... doesnt handle correctly
> x==INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE.
> 
> After I had fixed this, make "-j noNumber" run for some minutes -- in the
> beginning many process_register() failed, but make recovered successfully.
> After some minutes the wellknown loop again looped forever and I had to
> stop this experiment.
> 
> 
> Now I continued with your suggestion "-j 64" -- it run AFAICS allmost
> 1m without errors until I got ...
>     Assertion failed: a == g->changed, file .\remake.c, line 169
> ... this comes from an assertion I had inserted around this bug:
>     g->changed += commands_started - ocommands_started;
> (g->changed is only 8 bits wide).
> Today before my 1st test I thought this bug could cause this infinite
> loop, hence the assertion.
> Fixing this one is not so easy, cause this byte is also used as a flag
> and sometimes binary combined with some pseudo-bools, hence extending
> it to a bigger width has sideeffects to consider  --- please see my
> postings "some snippets from make381" in gnu.make.bugs from March 2005.
> Changelog from 2005-09-16 mentions another bool-related bug I had
> reported then. IMHO one should replace all pseudo bools in our code path
> with real bool's and their arithmetic and bitwise operations with logical
> operations - this concerns global and local variables, structure members,
> functions parameters and return types ... about 500 changes IIRC :-)

Sounds like we are on the right track.

Thanks for all the testing.