tests fail

[mr-c]

Hello,

I'm packaging gbwt for Debian; thank you for your contribution to open source scientific software.

One of the tests fail. Can you give us some advice?

$ uname -a
Linux mrcdev 4.18.0-2-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.18.10-2 (2018-11-02) x86_64 GNU/Linux
mcrusoe@mrcdev:~/debian/gbwt$ gcc --version
gcc (Debian 8.2.0-12) 8.2.0

[----------] 6 tests from BasicHaplotypes/VariantTest
[ RUN      ] BasicHaplotypes/VariantTest.VariantPathsStatistics/0
test_variants: /usr/include/sdsl/int_vector_buffer.hpp:217: sdsl::int_vector_buffer<t_width>& sdsl::int_vector_buffer<t_width>::operator=(sdsl::int_vector_buffer<t_width>&&) [with unsigned char t_width = 8]: Assertion `m_ifile.good()' failed. 

The current patches are at https://salsa.debian.org/med-team/gbwt/tree/master/debian/patches

[jltsiren]

Was this the first test you ran? Many of the tests write temporary files to the current directory, and the error message suggests that opening the file failed.

[mr-c]

Hello @jltsiren. I ran the tests via cd tests && make test.

[jltsiren]

This is fundamentally an SDSL issue. A default constructed sdsl::int_vector_buffer is not backed by any file. When you move assign the default constructed object to another sdsl::int_vector_buffer, the assignment operator tries to open a file with an empty name, which obviously fails. If you compile without -DNDEBUG, the assertion m_ifile.good() then fails. Otherwise the code works correctly.

On a certain level, the issue is that you compile code using SDSL without -DNDEBUG. People rarely do that. As a result, incorrect assertions can remain unnoticed for years, if the code itself works correctly. I've seen similar issues with SDSL before, and the solution has always been -DNDEBUG.

[mr-c]

Thank you @jltsiren for the reply; I've added -DNDEBUG to our build and that has fixed the tests. Perhaps it should be mentioned in the README or the Makefile amended?

[jltsiren]

There is a mention in README now. The makefile takes the options from $(SDSL_DIR)/Make.helper, where -DNDEBUG is enabled by default.

[mr-c]

Thanks!