On 10 Jul 2017, at 09:38, vm-dev-request@lists.squeakfoundation.org wrote:

Hi Max,

On 18 May 2017 at 13:32, Max Leske <maxleske@gmail.com> wrote:

We managed to figure out that OSProcess works when we use gcc <= 4.8 on
Debian. We are happy to use 4.8 for now, so we're good. It would of course
be super cool if we could use the series 6 gcc as that will soon ship with
Debian 9 (stretch) but it's probably not trivial to just move to a new
compiler version (as seems evident from the fact that a minor version
change can mess up compilation).

Thanks for tracking this problem down and sharing the details. I came upon
exactly the same problem with the Nix package and was able to work-around
that by also downgrading to gcc 4.8. I am sure it would have taken a long
time to work this out without the benefit of your experience.

Sweet! Nice to know that others benefit from my work (or woes) :)

Relatedly: Is there a suitable automated test that we can use to check that
our VMs are basically okay? I am pushing the switch to gcc 4.8 to resolve
this problem but I don't know whether this is causing other regressions or
what other obvious problems I have missed. I'd love a bit of test coverage
for the builds.

There are tests that are being run for every commit to https://github.com/opensmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm. Unfortunately, they don't explicitly include VM plugin related things. Also, the build is pretty much fixed to a specific GCC version by the build setup (depends on what Travis CI offers, for instance).

I fully agree, that it would be very helpful to have a more elaborate test suite that would take into account things like architecture and available libraries. I think, that could be a nice project for an intern, or a bachelor's thesis (cc'ing pharo-dev and squeak-dev).