[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#836230: Bug#836230: genometools: FTBFS in testing (a2x: ERROR: "xsltproc" returned non-zero exit status 6)

[Santiago Vila]

On Sat, Sep 03, 2016 at 12:50:35AM +0100, Sascha Steinbiss wrote:

> I must admit that I’m inclined to either close this bug or leave it
> open with the comment that the issue is currently not
> reproducible. At least it’s difficult to debug if I can’t get it to
> fail…

This reminds me of Kunth's quote: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I
have only proved it correct, not tried it".

I'm not going to ask for a "mathematical proof" that the code is correct
as a condition to close the bug, but on the other hand, the fact that
it FTBFS for me not once but several times (on different machines) is
an indication that there is a bug somewhere, so if there is a bug, it
should be investigated, not closed.

My recommended debug procedure for this is not to build it many times
as if we were rolling a dice, but instead examine the code, examine
the build log, and try to see how such thing may happen based
on what the makefile and build system does.

In many cases, a close look at the code and the way it fails leads to
the reason for the random failures. Example:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=817033#15

Thanks.