Re: ns validation

[John Heidemann <johnh@ISI.EDU>]

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999 10:31:50 EDT, Anna Charny wrote: 
>Hi,
>
>I have now succeeded  building ns on solaris, and most validation tests appear to run. However, for a subset of tests run by validate I get a notification of the type below:
>
>../../ns test-suite-simple.tcl tahoe3 QUIET
>Test output differs from reference output
>Diagnose with: diff test-output-simple/tahoe3.test test-output-simple/tahoe3
>Differences due to floating-point formatting are not significant.
>
>I have seen this mentioned in the archives, where it is basically stated that this is not an error to worry about. I wanted to doublecheck that this actually means that the difference is ONLY due to floating point formatting, or could this be an indication of a problem that warrants further investigation?  I could't find the place in the code which actually writes the 
>"Differences due to floating-point formatting are not significant" message...

The message is from ~ns-2/tcl/test/test-all-template1.

You should NOT assume that these errors are due to floating point
differences without actually diff'ing and looking at the output.
(The warning should probably read "If the differences are only in the
last place, they may be due to float-point formatting.").
The floating point message is output for all differences as a reminder
of the posibility.

   -John Heidemann