Among the things I’m doing ATM I have been meddling with shore-storage-manager[1].  I took the tar.bz2 file and ran ./bootstrap  ; ./configure ; make ; make check.

Some test script strangeness.

After running the last command in that list I encountered an error that was related to the calls to some test binaries in src/fc/test.  After some debugging I discovered that the script that was calling the test binaries without giving relative or full path.  I also notice that the script was being run by ksh (caveat: I have never run ksh).  I don’t know if ksh automatically looks for the executable in the local directory but that way of calling the test scripts seemed strange to me.  When I added the “./” to force ksh to look in the localdir and everything seemed to keep on working.

Stopped at a thread test

The `make check` process continued to execute but stopped at another point down the line.  This time it output that it was stuck on a test called `thread1`.  It did not error out, but it just stayed there.  I opened up the file that was at “src/sthread/tests” and looked at the source to see if I could find something fishy.  To no avail I started to place wait functions all over the place.  At this point I was quite frustrated, but I had another trick under my sleeve.  We got 2 weeks on the Intel Manycore Testing lab, which is basically a computer with  63 cores (thats what `cat /proc/cpuinfo` spit out).  I connected and ran the same `make check` command.  Surprisingly (for me) this got to the “thread1” spot, where my machine had stopped, and continued after a small pause.

Need the tcl-devel package installed

The test continued until it hit the smsh directory.  Then it started screaming about the lack of headers for tcl.  I did an `rpm -qa | grep tcl-devel` and found out  that the Intel machine did not have it installed (FYI, it’s a RHEL5.4).  I quickly found out that I don’t have the permissions to install anything so I wrote to Intel.  After some hours (surprisingly fast), Intel installed the tcl-devel package and I could test once more.

Need the right version of tcl-devel

ATM it requires tcl-devel 8.5.  Unfortunately the machine only had 8.4.  Wanting to avoid writing Intel again, I tried to change the tcl-devel version in the sources.  Once I changed all the strings with tcl8.5 to tcl8.4 I ran the `make check` once more and this time it finished quietly.