Re: Bug#384565: [Monotone-devel] Re: Bug#384565: monotone - FTBFS: Build killed with signal 15

[Shaun Jackman]

package monotone
tag 384565 confirmed moreinfo
thanks

On 9/28/06, Roman Zippel <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I debugged the problem a bit and the problem seems to be the
> BOOST_SP_DISABLE_THREADS define and monotone being linked against the
> multithreaded boost libraries. boost and monotone have a different idea
> of the sp_counted_base class, so that it gets initialized within monotone
> non-threaded and boost later tries to lock some initialized memory and
> thus hangs.
> I recompiled monotone without the two boost defines and it seems to work
> fine.
...

Nathaniel,

It appears the BOOST_SP_DISABLE_THREADS is the source of monotone's
cross-platform issues on Debian. Namely, that monotone fails to run
(deadlock) on s390, hppa, sparc, mips, and mipsel, but runs fine on
i386, amd64, ia64, alpha and powerpc [1].

[1] http://buildd.debian.org/build.php?pkg=monotone

One suggested workaround (by Roman Zippel above) is to remove
-DBOOST_SP_DISABLE_THREADS. The ChangeLog indicates that Nathaniel
added this feature on 2005-09-30.

So, my questions for the monotone mailing list are...

1. Is this more likely a bug in Boost or a bug in monotone?
2. Is it reasonable to workaround this bug by removing
-DBOOST_SP_DISABLE_THREADS?
3. Is it worth going to the extra effort to only define
-DBOOST_SP_DISABLE_THREADS on the platforms for which it works? I'll
consider this last option if it means a performance improvement of at
least, say arbitrarily, a factor of two or so.

Debian's freeze and release of Etch is imminent, and I'd like to nail
this bug before then. Otherwise, Etch will ship with the last bug-free
version of monotone, which was 0.28.

Thanks!
Shaun
your friendly Debian monotone maintainer