Re: [Grep-devel] regex and grep severely broken on HP-UX

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Paul,

> Some HP-UX versions have a broken 'calloc' that could explain the bug. The 
> broken 'calloc' returns memory that isn't properly zeroed. Can you 
> investigate 
> whether zeroing the calloc memory fixes the bug? Perhaps something like the 
> attached Gnulib patch?

This patch does not help: Even with it, test-regex still crashes in the
same way:
Assertion failed: err == REG_ESPACE, file ../../gllib/regexec.c, line 1077
FAIL test-regex (exit status: 134)

But I found GCC binaries that I can use on this machine, and with this GCC,
both the test-regex and all 'grep' tests pass!

Out of the four hypotheses
  (a) Unportable #if code that expands to invalid code for HP-UX cc.
  (b) A HP-UX cc front-end bug.
  (c) A HP-UX cc optimization bug.
  (d) A HP-UX cc code generation bug.
we can exclude (c) - since I had no optimization options enabled -,
and (a) is unlikely as well - since it would likely have affected the
compilation on HP-UX ia64 as well.

Conclusion: Either (b) or (d).

Bruno