2012/10/11 Kurt Zeilenga Kurt@openldap.org:

I note that these environment variables are specific to Linux, and then only certain Linux systems. If we add these, then we should also add similar environment variables for FreeBSD malloc(3), MacOS/X malloc(3), and various alternative malloc(3) libraries. And then we might get into cases where variables for one set of environmental variables conflict with another. As these can be set by the developer as desired in their development environment, there's little reason to get into setting all the malloc(3) environmental variables that might be useful... and we shouldn't play favors and only set variables for Linux.

Sorry for the delay, problems to the my $DAYWORK

Ok. First of all, elibc (debian/ubuntu recently) and glibc cover probably 95% of the Linux distributions, and they are compatible, in particular for the MALLOC_CHECK http://lwn.net/Articles/333755/ - i have also checked the source.

A considerable part of the remaining operating systems are like BSD - FreeBSD for example - and MacOSX, FreeBSD based. In fact, these latter two have different malloc library and it may be necessary to activate different controls for different systems (see the first reference) http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.network.openvswitch.devel/14838

http://www.unix.com/man-page/freebsd/5/malloc.conf/

But the benefits of automating these tests is to do a better AUTOQA for the buildsystem. It is also not true, as experience shows, that all developers know everything. Beeing expert in LDAP and C programming, for example, does not mean necessarily be an expert in everything: this can certainly be true for the OPENLDAP developers but it is not always the case. Here some examples:

http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2010-May/135683.html (this check had found many bug that the upstream developer haven't catched)

or this, from my mantainer, http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gcrypt-devel/2010-June/001605.html

I saw that you have closed the case(WANTFIX i think), however, I have to tell you better my opinion. If, as can happen, you decide that my reasons make sense, i can reroll my patch for Linux, macos and freebsd. Let me know.

Thanks anyway for your reply

-- Kurt