Re: [groff] 1.22.4.rc4 - Final RC before official 1.22.4

[Ingo Schwarze]

Hi Bertrand,

Bertrand Garrigues wrote on Thu, Dec 06, 2018 at 11:47:46PM +0100:
> On Thu, Dec 06 2018 at 09:45:31 PM, Ingo Schwarze <address@hidden> wrote:

>> i found out more about why the mom test is failing on Solaris 11.
>> It turns out not just the test is broken, but there is likely a
>> portability issue in gropdf(1).
>>
>> I see this in the build log:
>>
>>     GROFF    contrib/mom/examples/typesetting.pdf
>>   Negative length at /home/schwarze/groff-1.22.4.rc4p1.solaris11/build/gropdf
> [...]
>> I guess the length is supposed to be 176 + 2 * 256 = 688 (little endian)
>> but is instead calculated as 176 * 256^3 + 6 * 256^2 = 2953183232
>> (big endian).
>>
>> Frankly, that looks like an endianness bug.  Did anybody ever test
>> gropdf(1) on a big-endian platform?

> No, never. So the test server farm you are using gives you access to a
> real SPARC station?

Yes.  The OpenCSW build farm includes three LDoms (Solaris 11, 10,
and 9) on a T5220 UltraSparc T2 server, basically running on bare
metal big-endian hardware.

The build farm also includes three virtual machines (Solaris 11, 10,
and 9) running on vSphere x86, but i normally test on Sparc because
the x86 platform tends to be covered well by tests with other operating
systems, and the likelihood that something only fails in the combination
of Solaris with x86 is relatively low.  Besides, i somehow have to
limit the number of tests i'm doing, to not spend too much time.

But if something needs specific testing on Solaris x86, that can
be done.  I only do it when i see specific reasons to, or when
somebody specifically asks me for a test.

Yours,
  Ingo