[bug-gnu-utils] sharutils-4.13.4 test failures

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

I've done 35 or so builds of sharutils-4.13.4 today on about 25
flavors of Unix.  Most succeeded, and passed all tests, but on a few,
I get failures, with core dumps, like this:

        PASS: uutest-1
        FAIL: shar-1
        PASS: shar-2
        FAIL: shar-3
        PASS: shar-4

Changing compilers (different versions of gcc, or clang), and changing
optimization levels (w/ and w/o -O2), and changing the environment
(normal, or stripped to just PATH and HOME) does not fix the problem.

Failing systems include SGI IRIX MIPS, DragonFly BSD x86, Mac OS X
x86, MirBSD x86, OpenBSD x86 4.x and 4.x and Solaris x86 10 and 11.

On Mac OS X, changing from cc to c99 produces a build that passes all
of its tests.  

On the OpenBSD systems, shar-1 passes, but shar-3 fails.  

On Solaris x86 11, a build with c99 fails to compile, but with cc,
compiles and passes its tests.

During the course of this testing, I also discovered that

        make distclean

incorrectly deletes sharutils-4.13.4/doc/uudecode.1.  

I compared the directory contents after the distclean with a separate
unbundled copy of the .tar.gz file, verifying that uudecode.1 is the
only such incorrectly-deleted file.

The previous release, sharutils-4.13.3, built and passed its tests on
most of the systems for which 4.13.4 tests fail.

On request, I can provide a sharutils developer with a private copy of
the entire set of logs for failing builds.

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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: address@hidden  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       address@hidden  address@hidden -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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