bug#11913: Unusual Emacs 24.1 arithmetic error (abs) on i386 machine

[Rob Browning]

At the moment, Emacs 24.1 repeatedly fails to build on a Debian i386
build daemon, murphy, which is an actual i386 machine.  However, the
build finishes without a problem on biber which is an amd64 machine,
building in an i386 chroot.

I was hoping that the error might be familiar to someone; it looks like
this (for both Debian 24.1+1-1 and 24.1+1-2):

  cal-hebrew.el:815:1:Warning: global/dynamic var `entry' lacks a prefix
  cal-hebrew.el:819:56:Error: Arithmetic error: "abs", 8.0
  make[4]: *** [calendar/cal-hebrew.elc] Error 1
  make[4]: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....

I have attempted to reproduce the problem a number of different ways,
without success:

  - local i386 chroot on another amd64 host
  - local i386 wheezy kvm vm
  - local i386 squeeze kvm vm using a wheezy chroot (more similar to murphy)
  - local i386 host (thanks to Moritz)

I'm also asking about the possibility of shell access to murphy.

You can find the full build log for one of the failures here:

  
https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=emacs24&arch=i386&ver=24.1%2B1-2&stamp=1341453696

and the overall build summary here:

  https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=emacs24

Thanks
-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org
GPG as of 2002-11-03 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592 F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4