[cmake-developers] Parallel ctest issues on the MinGW-w64/MSYS2 platform

[Nils Gladitz]

On 29.03.2016 21:39, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> One of the PLplot developers, Arjen Markus, has just reported to me
> that ctest -j4 for PLplot hangs on his MinGW-w64/MSYS2 platform while
> ctest works fine. This issue occurred for the
> mingw64/mingw-w64-x86_64-cmake 3.4.1-1 package version of ctest.exe,
> and the PLplot build was done with the "MSYS Makefiles" generator. In
> contrast to the MinGW-w64/MSYS2 platform case, ctest -j4 works fine
> for the Linux case.
>
> Has anyone else here had similar difficulties OR success with the
> parallel ctest option on the MinGW-w64/MSYS2 platform?

Afair there are sporadic issues with the cygwin runtime (on which 
msys/msys2 is based) in the process handling code of kwsys (used by cmake).
The code is used by e.g. execute_process() and also ctest for test 
execution.

I think the issue is due to how pipes are implemented by the runtime.
 From what I remember rsync also suffers from this.

Also having Kaspersky installed (even when paused) seems to make these 
hangs more likely.

Nils