Bug#1106083: scilab: FTBFS: autobuilder hangs when using the kernel of trixie

[Étienne Mollier]

Hi Santiago,

I've been banging my head a fair part of the day wondering why
the error seemed to never occur when I was staring at it.  My
current conjecture would be to look at what happens when
stressing the entropy pool of the machine, as the random source
seems to behave slightly differently depening on real and
virtual hosts.  At the moment, I have had the build hanging
twice in a row at the same stage of documentation building,
while trying to stress the entropy pool with:

	$ cat /dev/random >/dev/null

The build froze in deadlock at the following command in the two
cases:

        /build/reproducible-path/scilab-2024.1.0+dfsg/scilab/.libs/scilab-bin -nb -noatomsautoload -nouserstartup -quit -f ./modules/helptools/data/configuration/regen_list.sce -nw

I have two reserves:

 0. if I trust Helmut Grohne, I cannot empty the entropy pool;
    maybe I can just make it more strained, so the behavior may
    be unreproducible to some extent: for instance I have not
    managed to reproduce the behavior straight on my laptop;
 1. the error occurs slightly earlier in the build log than your
    own records, so I may have triggered a different issue with
    my meddlings;
 2. I probably want to try this procedure a couple more times,
    to determine a more precise frequency of occurrence (I could
    have run into "coincidences" so far, a third iteration in a
    row would be "enemy in action").

I may continue after a good night of sleep, to at least
determine whether this is a real clue or just a dead end.  If
the former, then this would point to either an implementation
issue in scilab making it too fragile on the random source, or a
problem in the kernel's random source itself, since the behavior
has occurred more often with recent kernels, or a bit of both.

Have a nice day,  :)
-- 
  .''`.  Étienne Mollier <emollier at debian.org>
 : :' :  pgp: 8f91 b227 c7d6 f2b1 948c  8236 793c f67e 8f0d 11da
 `. `'   sent from my alarm clock
   `-
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