On 19/09/10 14:01, Dr. David Kirkby wrote: > 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? Sure, but it's a trivial wrapper script. Andrew.
