[m-dev.] night tests status report

[Fergus Henderson]

The nightly tests have been failing again.
There seem to be several causes:

	- Zoltan's change to delete index/2 wasn't bootstrapping
	  on taifun.  The problem here was that the change only
	  bootstrapped at optimization levels -O2 or higher,
	  and taifun was testing -O1.  For now I've just changed
	  taifun to use -O2.

	- Many of the test cases are failing in certain grades
	  on taifun.  The cause for that one is as yet unknown.
	  My guess is that it is most likely related to some of
	  Zoltan's RTTI changes, so I asked Zoltan to have a look at
	  it; hopefully he will get a chance to do so sometime soon.

	- I introduced some bugs in a couple of test cases,
	  specifically the new test case tests/debugger/polymorphic_output
	  that I recently added, and in tests/general/intermod_type.
	  Hopefully these are fixed now.

Another problem, which did not show up in the tests, is that the
`--split-c-files' version of the static Mercury standard library
(libmer_std.a) was being compiled with the wrong flags,
in particular `--pic-reg', which broke static linking (the default)
on hg and quicksilver, and possible on other machines too.
This was an indirect consequence of a bug fix that I made to
tools/test_mercury on 2000/03/24.  The basic problem is that the
tools/test_mercury script was using the same MCFLAGS for compiling the
library and compiler as it was for building the tests, and for the
tests it was using `--pic-reg' and shared libraries (to reduce disk
usage), which meant that it was using `--pic-reg' for compiling the
library too, which is not the right thing to do when building the
static libraries.  I'm testing a fix for that now.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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