[gpsd-dev] 24 hours of hell

[Eric S. Raymond]

THe last day has been extremely unpleasant.  For a short version of
the worst bits, see

    http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5089

For Gary and anyone else who has been thinking my coding was unusually
erratic recently, I found out at least one reason we've been at cross
purposes.  A bug in the build system has been confounding my testing.

commit 6ee0ea6ca66136579ebfbbd0f013144d76f5b85d
Author: Eric S. Raymond <address@hidden>
Date:   Thu Oct 31 05:11:41 2013 -0400

    PPS on a pty doesn't work.
    
    This had been breaking the regression tests for a while (since
    "Unconditionally enable PPS at startup." to be exact) but I didn't
    realize it because an unrelated bug in the build system was usually
    turning PPS off for me. Live tests were unaffected.
    
    All regression tests pass with pps either on or off.  Live PPS works.

Before this I had unknowingly failed to run a valid regression since
Tuesday morning.  If I hadn't been live-testing occasionally those
two days would have been a *continuous* clusterfuck, as opposed to
an intermittent one.

I don't yet know how to work around the bug. I've reported it to the
scons devteam.  It may actually be a design problem in the
autoconf-like extension I'm using rather than a core scons bug.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>

The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.  I could never
give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.
        -- Abraham Lincoln