We have noted on the Sage maths project that we get occasional build failures
when the constituent parts are built in parallel. Each time a bug is found, the
Makefile gets edited, only for another to be found. I built one component called
"Singular" 110 times and it worked in all 110 times. I did this in 4 directories
and started the builds at different times, but still I got the problem.
Others had built this package in parallel too. Then a Linux user suddenly gets a
a build failure due to a race condition.
This got me thinking if there was a way to make such race conditions more easily
found. One idea I had was for gcc to have an option to sleep for a random time
before it actually did anything. So if file A takes longer to compiler than file
B, by introducing some random element, this would change. This should make
uncovering race conditions much easier.
Does that sound a sensible idea?
Dave
