More on OSX build problems

[Dr. Alexander Klein]

Good morning,

I spent the better part of the weekend tracking the build problems I experience 
on OSX. I upgraded one of my machines to Snow Leopard, compiled and installed 
everything in /usr/local/ manually, and then started plodding downwards through 
Octave's revision tree.

After dozens of builds I can sum up my results as follows:

Each revision tagged as "stable" builds, but crashes during make check for as 
far as I could go back in the revision history without things breaking due to 
other problems, which begins shortly after the 3.2.4 release and ends around 
revision 128xy.

Here's the result from revision 13254, for example:

make -C test check
./build_sparse_tests.sh
./build_bc_overload_tests.sh ./bc_overloads_expected
../run-octave --norc --silent --no-history ./fntests.m .
octave(9664) malloc: *** error for object 0x102ecc5c0: pointer being freed was 
not allocated
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
panic: Abort trap -- stopping myself...
octave(9664) malloc: *** error for object 0x102ecc5c0: pointer being freed was 
not allocated
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
panic: attempted clean up apparently failed -- aborting...
make[1]: *** [check] Abort trap
make: *** [check] Error 2

Then again, none of the revisions that are not tagged "stable" showed this 
behaviour. Revision 13268 builds ok with a few failed tests during make check.

The one thing I don't get however: If the two revision trees are merged every 
once in a while as the commit messages suggest, then why aren't behaviours 
merged, too? I'd expect that after such a point either both would work or both 
would crash, but this simply isn't the case. What could be the reason for such 
strange differences in behaviour? Am I missing something?

I'm really at my wits' end ...

        Alex

-- 
          Dr. Alexander Klein, Diplom-Mathematiker

Physiologisches Institut       |               TransMIT Zentrum
Raum 543                       |        für Numerische Methoden
Aulweg 129                     |          Heinrich-Buff-Ring 44
35392 Giessen                  |                  35392 Giessen