[Pkg-octave-devel] [RFU] octave-ltfat 2.1.1+dfsg-1

[Rafael Laboissiere]

[Cc'ing to maintainers at octave.org.  I hope that the Octave developers may 
have suggestions to fix the problems.]

* Rafael Laboissiere <rafael at laboissiere.net> [2015-11-07 18:36]:

> I prepared version 2.1.1+dfsg-1 of the octave-ltfat package in Git 
> (commit f006100).  This is an upstream version bump.  I removed the 
> architecture restrictions for the unit testing.  Please, upload it to 
> unstable and we will on which architectures there will be build 
> failures. Unfortunately, the unit tests in octave-ltfat take a very 
> long time to complete and this may be the cause of the build failures 
> on some old architectures.

Well, according to the buildd web page [1], the octave-ltfat package 
built correctly on most of the official architectures in Debian unstable. 
The unit testing failed on ppc64 (powerpc) [2] and s390x [3], and that 
aborted the build process.  The build on mips is takng a very long time 
to finish and I suspect that it will also fail.  At any rate, here are 
the known reasons of failure:


* ppc64

 ===============  TEST_PFILT ==============
 *** Error in `/usr/bin/octave-cli': munmap_chunk(): invalid pointer: 0x13871e18 ***

This is a memory management problem.  This does not happen on other 
architectures but I am not sure it is related to the s390x architecture 
or it comes from the specific host used to build the package.


* s390x

 ===============  TEST_DGT ================
 ** On entry to ZGEMM  parameter number  8 had an illegal value

This error is related to the call to the zgemm routine of the BLAS 
library.  Since the test passed on all other architectures, I would guess 
that this is a compiler problem on s390x, but I really do not know.


In the previous releases of the Debian package octave-ltfat, we disabled 
the unit testing for the problematic architectures, but this is not a 
good option, because we ship then packages that are potentially buggy on 
some architectures.

Any help on fixing these problems will be welcome.

Best,

Rafael

  1. https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=octave-ltfat&suite=unstable
  2. https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=octave-ltfat&arch=ppc64&ver=2.1.1%2Bdfsg-1&stamp=1446936606
  3. https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=octave-ltfat&arch=s390x&ver=2.1.1%2Bdfsg-1&stamp=1446934532