Mysterious Branch Failures with PPC/Darwin Make

[Peter Lobsinger]

For a week, kid51 and myself have been debugging the
tt1931-nci-parameters-deprecation branch. After having discovered and
fixed a number of issues, one problem remains. Some build stages and
tests (generally NQP or PCT programs), when run automatically under
make, consistently trigger an assertion violation in the GC system;
yet when run from the command line, they consistently run to
completion correctly. The text of the assertion violation is:

  src/gc/gc_gms.c:1231: failed assertion '!PObj_on_free_list_TEST(pmc)
|| !"Resurrecting of dead objects is not supported"'

The odd thing about this is that the branch is NCI-related. It does
not modify the internals of GC, it does not significantly change any
core PMCs, nor do any other things that might put it at higher risk of
introducing a GC bug. Stranger still, the programs exhibiting the bugs
do not even make use of NCI.

I would ask any Parrot developers with access to a PPC/Darwin (aka OS
X) machine to attempt to reproduce this bug. I welcome any and all
insights into this matter, especially what make (specifically GNU Make
3.80) might be doing to trigger the error.

Thanks,

Peter Lobsinger