Bug#746925: glib2.0 FTBFS on alpha: test-suite failure in async-splice-output-stream

[TRACY, ROBERT C CTR USAF AFSPC 90 IOS/DOP]

I finally achieved a successful non-SMP build of glib2.0 (2.44.1-1.1) on my PWS-433au.
SMP builds are still broken: still investigating.

Verified the existence of at least two tests for which the notion of "setup" and "settle"
times have meaning, but since the exact failure mechanism is unknown, the best I can
offer presently is advice to watch for such things.  They *are* somewhat dependent on
the release of libc6, as Michael and I found when an update for that package was
applied a few days ago.

One build issue that showed up on my system that will NOT show up on a standard
buildd system concerns the use of "gdb", if present, by the "run-assert-msg-test.sh"
script.  First problem: "gdb" gets run on the wrapper script instead of the binary in
the ".libs" subdirectory.  Second problem: "gdb" cannot reference the memory
location corresponding to "print (char*) __glib_assert_msg" (found in the ".gdb"
file for the test).  "gdb" isn't part of the base configuration, nor is it a build dependency,
so the "gdb" package won't be present on a buildd system unintentionally.

Suggested workaround is to ignore whether "gdb" is present and simply don't run
that portion of the test.  After all, if a satisfactory result is deemed to have been
obtained in the absence of "gdb", why the essentially duplicate test?  The irony is,
the desired error message string is obtained when "gdb" runs the executable, but
it's not in the output captured for subsequent processing by "grep".

--Bob