Subject: bug#77840: [bug-diffutils] bug#77840: Testing diffutils 3.12 on PPC Mac OS X 10.4.11, Tiger, produces so many failures

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 20 May 2025 09:25:34 -0700

On 2025-05-20 03:29, Peter Dyballa wrote:
> 
>> Am 19.Mai.2025 um 20:16 schrieb Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>:
>>
>> There are lots of failures there, but unfortunately I don't have access to that old platform so you'll need to do some more digging to isolate the cause.
>>
>> Let's look at the first failure.
>>
>> echo a > a
>> echo b > b
>> diff a b
>>
>> This doesn't generate the correct output. Can you run 'diff' under a debugger and see why?
> 
> This fails

If I understand you correctly, you're saying that although the original 
bug report shows the above test failing when you run 'make check', you 
cannot reproduce the problem when you run the same test under GDB.

However, I see that you ran /opt/local/bin/gdiff under GDB. Could you 
try running the just-built diff instead? That's the diff that 'make 
check' runs. Also, first please try just running it under the shell, 
without using GDB.

The point is that we must be able to reproduce the bug reliably and 
simply; otherwise it won't be practical to investigate it.