Re: Buildfarm failures on woodlouse (in ecpg-check)

On 06/11/2017 11:33 AM, Christian Ullrich wrote:
> Hello,
>
> my buildfarm animal woodlouse (Visual Studio 2013 on Windows 7)
> stopped working correctly some months ago. After Tom kindly prodded me
> into fixing it, I noticed that I had configured it to skip the
> ecpg-check step because one of the tests in the "thread" section (not
> always the same) nearly always failed.
>
> I had set it up in circa 2015, so I reenabled the step to see whether
> anything had changed since, and it started failing again.
>
> Through some trial and error, and with the help of Microsoft's
> Application Verifier tool, I found what I think is the cause: It looks
> like the VS 2013 CRT's setlocale() function is not entirely
> thread-safe; the heap debugging options make it crash when
> manipulating per-thread locale state, and according to the comments
> surrounding that spot in the CRT source, the developers were aware the
> code is fragile.
>
> I crudely hacked a critical section around the setlocale() call in
> pgwin32_setlocale(). After this change, the test does not crash, while
> without it, it crashes every time.
>
> If there is interest in fixing this issue that is apparently limited
> to VS 2013, I will try and produce a proper patch. I notice, however,
> that there is a pthread compatibility layer available that I have no
> experience with at all, and I assume using it is preferred over
> straight Win32?
>
> My hack is attached; please feel free to tell me I'm on the wrong track.
> To build correctly, it requires defining _WIN32_WINNT to be 0x600 or
> above (and using an SDK that knows about InitOnceExecuteOnce()).
>
>

It's certainly worth doing.

I turned off testing ecpg ages ago on bowerbird because I was getting
errors. That's an older version of the toolset.

We already define _WIN32_WINNT to be 0x0600 on all appropriate platforms
(Vista/2008 and above), so I think you could probably just check for
that value.

I have no opinion on the pthread question.

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan https://www.2ndQuadrant.com
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