Subject: Re: [bug-diffutils] bug#24228: bug#24228: [platform-testers] new snapshot available: diffutils-3.4.9-d647

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2016 09:30:07 -0700

On 09/08/2016 05:02 AM, Dagobert Michelsen wrote:
>>>> FAIL: test-timespec
>>>> >>>===================
>>>> >>>
>>>> >>>test-timespec.c:138: assertion 'cmp (a, b) == sign (i - j)' failed
>>>> >>>FAIL test-timespec (exit status: 262)
>> >
>> >This one is interesting.
>> >It would be great if you could get in with a debugger to see what
>> >exactly is going wrong.
>> >It's probably not an issue for diffutils, as it barely uses timespec
>> >at all and does not use timespec_sub.
> I didn’t get into looking into that yet, sorry.
>

If the failure is in line test-timespec.c line 138 it is more likely a 
bug in timespec_cmp.

For what it's worth I cannot reproduce the problem on Solaris 10 sparc 
when compiling with Oracle Studio 12.5 with the -m64 flag. I used the 
current version of gnulib (commit 
7da1068a87c331793af73359d8637d140d08a674), created the test with 
'./gnulib-tool --create-testdir --dir foo timespec', built it with 
'./configure CC="cc -m64"' and ran it with 'make check'.

Perhaps it was a compiler bug, fixed in Oracle Studio 12.5? One can 
always hope.