Re: Author tests and IPC::System::Simple

[Paul Fenwick <pjf@perltraining.com.au>]

G'day Gregor / debian-perl,

gregor herrmann wrote:

> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> $VAR1 = '"/usr/bin/perl" died to signal "ABRT" (6) and dumped core at t/08_core.t line 41
> ';
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> My guess is that Perl 5.8.8 and Perl 5.10.0 just have different error
> messages ...

Except that these error messages are generated by IPC::System::Simple (ISS),
and are exactly what we're testing, so they really shouldn't be different.
If a process is dumping core, and ISS is not reporting it, then that's a bug!

The way in which ISS looks for core dumps is by using:

	WCOREDUMP($?), if defined in POSIX.pm
	$? & 128,      otherwise

At least on Etch/5.8.8, the WCOREDUMP macro is not defined.  There's a
possibility that on 5.10.0 it *is* defined, but isn't working how we expect.
 We can test for that easily enough:

	perl -MPOSIX=WCOREDUMP -e1

If that gives an error (which I expect it will), then we don't have
WCOREDUMP defined, and are using our internal logic.

If we're not using WCOREDUMP, then we face the disturbing possibility that
we're generating a core dump, and ($? & 128) is false when that occurs.

Is there any chance you can grab my development copy of IPC::System::Simple,
either via HTTP with:

	http://github.com/pfenwick/ipc-system-simple/tarball/master

or git:

	git clone git://github.com/pfenwick/ipc-system-simple.git

and run the tests against that?  The new code should display the contents of
$? on the failing core tests, which will give us some clues as to where the
problem lies.

Thanks very much for reporting this.  It's really appreciated!

	Paul

-- 
Paul Fenwick <pjf@perltraining.com.au> | http://perltraining.com.au/
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