Re: [Plplot-devel] Intermittent Ada example build failures are now back again (SOLVED by gnat-8)

[Alan W. I. <Ala...@gm...>]

On 2018-07-16 10:10-0700 Alan W. Irwin wrote:

> On 2018-06-09 13:30-0700 Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>
>> On 2018-04-15 11:15-0700 Alan W. Irwin wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi Jerry:
>> [...]
>>> So once this Ada build issue appeared again for me yesterday after all
>>> those previous successful hardware checks, I did a google search for
>>> the terms (without the quotes) "gnatmake intermittent build error" and
>>> found
>>> <https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?format=multiple&id=65451>
>>> which was a bug report in 2015 about intermittent Ada build issues
>>> which was immediately fixed back then.  However, my gnat version (=
>>> 4.9.2) is from 2014 so I don't have that bugfix and I am pretty sure
>>> at this stage that bug 65451 is the issue that is causing the
>>> intermittent Ada build issues for me. Therefore, I plan to use the
>>> -DENABLE_ada=OFF option for my further testing until I can get access
>>> to a later version of the Ada build tools myself, and I suggest others
>>> who currently don't have access to Ada build tools with bug 65451
>>> fixed should do the same.
>> 
>> Just to follow up for Debian Buster with gnat-7 (as opposed to gnat-4 that 
>> I
>> was using for Debian Jessie) the first test of Ada has been a complete 
>> success.
>> See commit 994723471 for the details of the tests I ran.
>
> Hi Jerry:
>
> I just ran into this issue for the first time for my new hardware and
> latest Ada/gnat (version 7.3.0) from Debian Buster (sigh).  I was
> doing a parallel build (with -j10 for my new system with 8 real
> cores), when the following error was encountered:
>
> ./plplot_standard.o: file not recognized: File truncated
> collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
> gnatlink-7: error when calling /usr/bin/gcc-7
> gnatmake: *** link failed.
> examples/ada/CMakeFiles/xstandard30a.dir/build.make:77: recipe for target 
> 'examples/ada/xstandard30a' failed
> make[3]: *** [examples/ada/xstandard30a] Error 4
>
> A google search found
> <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=857831> which
> appears to be a similar (or the same bug) for 7.1.  At the time, the
> Debian packagers thought they had a fix, but it seems from my
> experience either that was not true or else the fix has not been
> propagated to 7.3. I have just now privately reported the situation to
> Matthias Klose (the author of the bug 857831 report, and they guy who
> decided that bug was fixed), and we will see what he says.  But to
> work around this problem until it is fixed for Debian Buster, I plan
> to use -DENABLE_ada=OFF for my testing.
>

To Jerry and Arjen:

On Sunday (just before commit 7ec926fae) I discovered that my installs
of gdc-7 and gnat-7 were probably not good choices because although I
had both gcc-7 and gcc-8 installed, PLplot was being built with gcc-8
rather than gcc-7 on my Debian Buster system.  So in this case at
least Debian does not have tight version consistency requirements
between either gdc or gnat and gcc.  And perhaps that is justified
since previously I was
getting perfect results with the combination of gdc-7 and gcc-8.
However, the above parallel build issue with gnat-7 encouraged me to try gnat-8, and
I decided to install gdc-8 as well just to be consistent with gcc-8.
It turns out (see the above commit message for the details) the
combination of gdc-8, gnatmake-8, and gcc-8 produces perfect massively
(-j10) parallel build and test results
for a comprehensive set of of configurations and build trees, and for
three different CMake versions.

So it seems once again that on Linux at least, parallel builds of our
Ada bindings and examples work well, and I advise on other platforms
to avoid gnat-7 in all cases, to use parallel builds with caution, and
at least for the sake of consistency use the same version of gdc,
gnat, and gcc (e.g., gdc-8, gnat-8, and gcc-8).

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
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