Bug in test suite for pcre 4.3

[Mark Baker <mark@mnb.org.uk>]

Andreas Metzler wrote:

> Mark has uploaded it yesterday in the evening. The bad news is that
> 4.3 seems to be broken on m68k, ia64 and alpha, "make test" fails.

I do not believe it is actually broken, at least not on alpha; I'm 
assuming the problems on the other architectures are similar.

> It does not look like a compiler/packaging related issue, I've
> doublechecked on escher (alpha) using its woody installation and the
> sid chroot: 3.9 compiles/tests fine (both with Mark's handcrafted
> Makefile and the one shipped by upstream, 4.3 does not. - Both on
> woody (gcc 2.95) and sid (gcc 3.2.something).

The tests for pcre consist of running a test program, and then comparing 
its output against an expected output. One thing that the program does 
is the following:

        new_info(re, extra, PCRE_INFO_STUDYSIZE, &size);
	[...]
        fprintf(outfile, "Study size = %d\n", size);

and this is what is different here. Now, although the size is returned 
from a function that's gets information about a particular regex, it's 
actually a constant, which is the size of the pcre_study_data structure.

This structure:

	typedef struct pcre_study_data {
	  size_t size;                   /* Total that was malloced */
	  uschar options;
	  uschar start_bits[32];
	} pcre_study_data;

is 48 bytes on alpha, 40 bytes on i386 and most other platforms. These 
are the figues that appear in the test failure report. I haven't tried 
ia64 or m68k, the other ones that failed, but I guess it's 48 on ia64; 
I'm not sure about 68k.

The main difference is that size_t is 8 bytes on alpha, being a 64-bit 
platform. I guess the other four bytes are padding.

Clearly, this test failure is nothing to worry about, but unfortunately 
the debian packages will not successfully build without all tests 
passing. I can release a fixed package that either ignores the result of 
this test, or has an altered pcretest.c that cheats.

Philip, I have CC'd you on this mail as the upstream author, because I 
believe this counts as a bug in pcre. I would suggest as a minimum 
removing the printing of the study size from the test.