Excerpts from Roberto Bagnara's message of Wed Nov 18 08:51:24 +0100 2009:
I am sorry about the delay, but I am snowed under other committments. We routinely test the PPL with make -j (for j in the range [2, 8]) so I am pretty sure parallelism is not the cause. I have no access now to the machine where I have a Debian VM: I will have to wait for the weekend for that).
Israel, perhaps you can help us debugging this problem?
Yes, I saw the bug report in Debian, and I did some tests, but I am also puzzled about this bug.
The problem only appears on amd64 architectures. Unfortunately I don't have access to an amd64 machine.
However, I think that there are two workarounds that can be tried out here:
- The first one is building the package without running the tests (I think that problem appears only when running the tests). I am not sure if this could be a Debian policy violation or not (I guess not).
- The other one is trying to recompile gmp with -fexceptions and then ppl again to see if the problem persists. For details, see http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=552959#25
Interestingly, this problem does not always appear:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=552959#35
That is someone reporting that the package built successfully on amd64.
So weird thing.
Israel