Re:Diagnosing a Linux-only unit test failure
by dunham on Monday October 09, 2017 @12:36PM
(#15435289)
I ran into a similar issue years ago. Our tests, written on macos, were failing on linux, because pdftotext was producing different output.
I traced down the logic, added some debugging print statements, and it magically fixed itself.
Eventually, I figured out the issue that they were comparing floats with == and intel processors have a few extra internal bits that disappear when stored. Macos, which uses floats in its UI layer, defaults to adding -ffloat-store to the compile flags to get around similar issues.
I ended up just adding -ffloat-store to our Linux build of pdftotext. (I briefly thought about fixing the comparisons, but it turned out the code was full of them.)
I traced down the logic, added some debugging print statements, and it magically fixed itself.
Eventually, I figured out the issue that they were comparing floats with == and intel processors have a few extra internal bits that disappear when stored. Macos, which uses floats in its UI layer, defaults to adding -ffloat-store to the compile flags to get around similar issues.
I ended up just adding -ffloat-store to our Linux build of pdftotext. (I briefly thought about fixing the comparisons, but it turned out the code was full of them.)