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Date:      Wed, 30 Sep 1998 13:54:18 +0200
From:      Alexander Sanda <entropy@compufit.at>
To:        current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Very strange thing happened today
Message-ID:  <19980930135418.A15529@compufit.at>

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Ok, here is the deal:

While making buildworld today (CVS'upped ca. 11am GMT), I got an error:

/opt/src/src/gnu/lib/libobjc/../../../contrib/gcc/objc/list.h:142:
parse error before `objc_list'

Well, I checked the file list.h and found the following:

(starts at line 139)

/* Free list (backwards recursive) */

static void
list_frestruct objc_list* list)
{
  if(list)
    {
      list_free(list->tail);
      free(list);
    }
}

Note that the function definition is wrong in some way :)  I checked
against the original file on ftp.freebsd.org and found out that the
real line has to be:

static void
list_free(struct objc_list* list)

Some_thing_ has stolen 2 characters from the function definition. Best
of all, neither the filesize nor the timestamp have been changed
(still 3521 bytes, 18 Sep 1996), _but_ 2 junk characters (0-bytes) have
been added to the end of the file. I still have a copy of the altered
file, so if somebody would be interested, I could mail him the header
file.

Ok, I'am a bit worried, what happened here ?
Black magic, voodoo, aliens, cosmic rays ? :)

Yes, this whole stuff sounds a bit unrealistic, but it's not a joke, it
happened exactly this way.

The problem is - of course I expected this - not reproduceable,
and will probably never happen again, but I'am still a bit scared about
it. I'am quite closely following -current (aka -BETA), and I'am
building world at least once a week. However, I'am still a.out.
Normally, I'am doing make -j16 (mainly, because it's a good stress test
:) ) and - apart from "real" build failures due to wrong code - I never
got strange or non-reproduceable build errors. 

I don't believe in bad hardware, because this box is running solid like
a rock - I never get strange crashes, segfaults or something else, and
I never saw a NT bluescreen on this box. But it could be a harddisk
problem, right ?

Hardware description (might be unimportant):

Gigabyte GA6x86 Socket 8 mainboard, FX chipset, Pentium Pro/200 (512K),
192 MB EDORAM (36bit Kingston SIMMs _with_ parity)

/usr/src and /usr/obj are both on the same IDE drive (Fujitsu
MPA3035ATU).

-- 
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