CentOS - Oct 2006 - make 3.79.1 assertion failed error

Hi,

Sorry for cross-posting but I need to tap into my most helpful 
mailinglists for this problem. I have had assertion failed errors from 
make before and never understood what they were or where they came from.

But now that I have them consistently for ffmpeg and mplayer on everything 
smaller than FC2, which prevents me from updating both mplayer and ffmpeg 
(and I know lots of other applications have the same issue).

The exact error is:

	make: expand.c:489: allocated_variable_append: Assertion
`current_variable_set_list->next != 0' failed.

By coincidence (called Google) I found this page:

	http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/faq.html#faq.make_dies

and it made the relation with make 3.79.1 pretty clear. (fc1, el3, rh9, 
rh7 and el2 all use make 3.79.1)

I was wondering if anyone knows of a better solution than explained in 
the valgrind FAQ, or better than upgrading make.

Once upon a time mplayer built without this assertion, other applications 
as well. So is this caused by a more recent configure/autotools used by 
the developers ? Some way to prevent this ?

Anyone ? :)

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Bogdan Costescu wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Dag Wieers wrote:
> 
> > I was wondering if anyone knows of a better solution than explained 
> > in the valgrind FAQ, or better than upgrading make.
> 
> You mean that you want/need to have CFLAGS set when starting the build ?
> What's the reason for that ?
One of the packaging policies is that CFLAGS is set to match %{optflags} 
as part of the %build phase. %configure does that.

 
> I'm able to build the latest RF mplayer SRPM (1.0-0.20.pre7.rf) on a 
> CentOS 3.8 without this error. This is a real machine, not a VM, 
> chroot or x86_64 one compiling for i386; building as a normal user, 
> not as root. CFLAGS is not set when the rpmbuild command is started.
Neither is it when I start rpmbuild :)

> > So is this caused by a more recent configure/autotools used by the 
> > developers ?
> 
> Could you please explain how you envision a different 
> configure/autotools changing the picture ?
I meant a different make/autotools. I prefer not to change my build 
environment. My packages should be able to build on the original 
distribution, not original distribution + new make/autotools.

I prefer not to deviate from Red Hat. I prefer not to replace Red Hat's 
make/autotools. For unmaintained distributions like RH7 or RH9 I couldn't 
care, but for EL2.1 and EL3 this is very much a liability.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]