Re: Problems with the Windows build

[John W. Eaton]

On 10/28/2013 02:52 AM, John W. Eaton wrote:
> [I also posted the following information to the bug #40381 (the PATH
> setting was suggested in one of the comments in that report). --jwe]
>
> I tried building current Octave (hg id = 8b353af4a1ca) with mxe-octave
> (hg id = e7cb2340feff+; changes only in the version number and sha1sum
> for the Octave tar file that I generated).
>
> When I copy the resulting binary to my Windows 7 system and run
> __run_test_suite__, it fails a number of tests, some with a message
> about not finding makeinfo not recognized as an internal or external
> command, operable program, or batch file. But system ("makeinfo
> --version") displays the makeinfo version info as expected.
>
> This message doesn't show up until later in the tests, so I thought
> maybe we were accumulating open files or something similar that was
> preventing Octave from opening program files to run. So I tried
> running only the fixed tests, but that doesn't seem to avoid the
> problem.
>
> Then I tried running Octave from inside an msys terminal window after
> setting PATH as suggested and it crashes with a segfault in the fsolve
> test.
>
> I'm also noticing a number of times when the GUI appears to hang and I
> get a spinning cursor. It usually comes back after 5-10 (or maybe
> more) seconds, but I have no idea what is going on during the delay.
>
> Ugh, we can't release like this...

Following up on this, the errors about not finding makeinfo were
apparently caused by the bug in setenv.  Here's what I posted about
this in the bug tracker:

I checked in the following change to fix the setenv/putenv problem. It
seems to work for me.

http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/rev/415583856971

I guess this is the reward I get for trying to fix a memory leak. :-(

It would probably be better to figure out why gnulib::setenv isn't
working, but for now I'm going with this change.

This does improve the situation for me with the tests. Now I'm seeing
11402 PASS, 22 FAIL, 4 XFAIL, and 55 SKIPPED. I'm not building with
LLVM or JAVA, so that's probably why the skipped count is so high.

Now that Octave can properly set the PATH before executing programs,
I'm not seeing the messages about makeinfo. I am still seeing a series
of permission denied errors from system-tst about date.m. It looks
like it is searching the load path for date.m and giving a permission
denied error about the file in each directory of the load path. I
don't know what that's about, but anyway things look a lot better to
me now than they did this time yesterday...

jwe