Known Defects and Limitations
It is our policy
to be open about existing defects in our own products and to provide
workarounds if possible. This list will be updated as necessary. The
product itself may occasionally be subjected to patch releases if necessary
which will be appropriately documented.
Since its first release in 1999, the toolset parsing engine has accumulated
a released defect (i.e. fault that failed) density of only 0.26 per
1000 lines of source code. This is one of the lowest ever achieved and
is about 3 times better than that of CDIS, one of the components of
the London Heathrow air-traffic control system, itself one of the most
reliable systems ever produced, (Pfleeger
and Hatton (1997)).
No defect has ever re-occurred.
Index
-D
flags
Slow
GUI response on big files (Windows)
Slow
response on "Behaviour->Set locations->Output files ..."
(Windows)
Earlier releases
only
Personality
file switches off some messages, (SCT2.2)
Blanks
in names, (all releases until 2.1)
Macro
parenthesisation in SCT1.1b
NT
licensing problem in SCT 1.1b and earlier
Size
restriction on pathologically big files on the Sparc version
-D
flags
- (Internal DSCT111999070601).
If a D flag is entered under the Behaviour -> Parsing options ->
Set -D flags menu with a value in quotes and that value contains blanks,
the interface does not display anything. For example -DBLOB=1 and
-DBLOB="1" are OK but -DBLOB=" 1 " is not.
- Workaround: Re-enter
as -DBLOB="@1@". This turns out to be a particularly difficult
portability problem for argument passing. It should be resolved in
a later release.
Blanks
in names
- (Internal DSCT111999070501).
If a directory or sub-directory contains a blank on a Unix system,
the interface may exhibit strange behaviour. (It is not alone in this,
many other products also screw-up.) It is not a problem for Windows
releases because Windows returns the ~ notation so that other parts
of Windows don't screw up, (with only partial success as can be seen
by trying the Open menu of the EDIT program in an MS-DOS window).
- Workaround: Don't
have blanks in directory names on Unix machines including Linux of
course. Most combinations do work but we don't guarantee it.
NT
installation problems
- We have had one
or two reports of the licensing system failing to install properly
on some versions of NT. The symptom is that it will only allow a full
licence and will not allow evaluation, (no, this is NOT deliberate
:-) ). We suspect it is something to do with permissions. We do an
internal trial load on one of our own NT 4.0 machines in both Administrator
and normal User modes without problem so we don't know why it happens
although it has certainly not increased our general respect for NT.
Workaround: Please
contact us and we will try and sort it out.
Macro
parenthesisation in SCT 1.1b
- There is a documentation
error for MISRA rule 96. The message says function-like macros should
be parenthesised but this gets issued for all macros, so it is over-zealous.
The rule is attached to the correct message in SCT 1.1c.
Slow
GUI response on big files (Windows)
- On some versions
of Windows, analysing a file does not appear to have any effect immediately.
Please have patience, it takes about 15 seconds to clear the main
text window if a large file is displayed on some versions of Windows
for some reason, (it is near instantaneous under both Linux and Solaris).
The button will remain depressed until the analysis is finished. We
have no workaround at the moment.
Slow
response on "Behaviour->Set locations->Output files ..."
(Windows)
- If the currently
selected directory location for output files contains a large number
of files, some versions of Windows take a considerable time to figure
this out - again of the order of 15-20 seconds if there are say 1500
files in this directory. The widget only appears when the listing
is complete so again please be patient.
Size
restriction on pathologically big files on the Sparc version
- For some very
large tokens, the Sparc version of the lexer overflows. This occurs
on two rather unusual files in FIPS160. It is not expected to affect
many programs and we are working on re-writing this part of the engine
to avoid the problem. The Linux and Windows versions are fine.
Personality
file switches off some messages, (SCT2.2)
- A defect was
introduced in the 2.2 release whereby the use of a personality file
without any -D flags being set would shut off some messages. The workaround
is to add a -DWORKAROUND macro definition in Behaviour->Parsing
options->Set -D flags. This is fixed in SCT2.2a.
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more details, contact us.
