Testing failure in Debian/Sparc

[olebole]

While this looks like #963 I guess this is something and not connected to the Bigendian issue discussed there:

On Debian/Sparc, the testing step fails with a

[...]
astropy/io/votable/tests/exception_test.py:10: test_reraise PASSED
astropy/io/votable/tests/exception_test.py:25: test_parse_vowarning PASSED
make[1]: *** [test-python2.7] Error 246
astropy/io/votable/tests/table_test.py:31: test_table make[1]: Leaving directory `/build/buildd-python-astropy_0.2.1-1~exp5-sparc-ydjg4f/python-astropy-0.2.1'

https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=python-astropy&arch=sparc&ver=0.2.1-1%7Eexp5&stamp=1366710710
This "Error 246" was not introduced by the Bigendian fixes in #1003 but appeared also in the original 0.2.1 compilation.

[mdboom]

Yeah -- I don't have much idea about this one. I haven't been having any luck getting a Sparc qemu VM up and running, so without access to the hardware, I'm not sure what we can do...

[embray]

I asked IT a while back about getting access to either a Sparc VM or a physical machine for testing but that was a few weeks ago and they have yet to respond. So I'm going to harass them about that again....

[mdboom]

It's not inconceivable that #1010 might fix this if sparc has the same nan floating point exceptions that MIPS does.

[olebole]

@mdboom I tested it with a new upload to Debian experimental, and it seems that this is different. The failure is still there. I am a bit curious why there is no explicite failure in the individual tests?
@iguananaut Unfortunately, the Sparc32 emulation (sun4m) on qemu is not capable to run new Linux distributions. There is a sparc64 emulation as well, which may work.

[olebole]

On a sparc64 port, the tests succeed:
http://buildd.debian-ports.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=python-astropy&arch=sparc64&ver=0.2.1-1&stamp=1367369364
One wild guess: can this be a pointer misalignment problem? Sparc requires, that pointer are well-alligned; otherwise the access ends up in a bus error.

[olebole]

With version 0.2.3, this problem seems to be silently fixed :-)
See https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=python-astropy&arch=sparc&ver=0.2.3-1&stamp=1371269136
for the log file.

[mdboom]

Ok -- I'm going to close this then. Feel free to reopen if it silently breaks again ;)