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From: mayer@rocksanne.UUCP (Jim Mayer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Bizzare, non repeatable, 4.3 C compiler behavior
Message-ID: <328@rocksanne.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 16-Jul-87 13:19:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: rocksann.328
Posted: Thu Jul 16 13:19:46 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 18-Jul-87 08:08:04 EDT
Organization: Xerox: Webster Research Center, Rochester, NY
Lines: 27

I have been having the following, rather bizzare, problem with the 4.3bsd
C compiler.  I get non repeatable compiler errors!  By non repeatable I
mean that if I reissue the same command, I will get a different error
or a successful compile.  The errors are usually of the form:

	compiler error in lib/ccom
or
	compiler error: couldn't find basic type 14 (or 4, or 10) for FOO

The behavior is rather bursty; sometimes it goes away, and sometimes it makes
it almost impossible to get any work done.  When the compiler completes
successfully it always seems to produce a good object file.

What really puzzles me is the non repeatable behavior of the problem.  I took
a brief look through the sources, and didn't find any obvious causes of
non repeatable behavior (calls to "time", "gettimeofday"; writes to temp files
that do not include the current pid, etc.).  It could be a file system or hardware
problem, but fsck seems to run fine.  Also, I recall having similar problems on
other UNIX machines (4.2 I believe) but never this frequently.

Has anybody else had this problem?  Do poltergeists really exist?

-- Jim
-- 
(Grapevine) mayer.wbst			(Arpa) mayer.wbst@Xerox.com
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