Factor submission problems [FIXED]

[kugano]

All,

I've looked long and hard at the broken factor submission script. We've ruled out code / scripting problems, but still don't know for sure what's going on. The submission script's Perl environment is behaving completely unpredictably -- for some factors, I can make it work simply by inserting a print statement in a certain spot. I've seen this behavior caused by memory corruption in low-level languages, but that shouldn't be possible in Perl. And I even rewrote a different factor submission script, from scratch, independent of Louie's code, and it still exhibited the same unpredictable behavior.

We also reverted to the old kernel, but this did not fix the problem.

We do have more things to try:

1 - Upgrade Perl. We're still running the 5.6 series, so it's severely due for an upgrade anyway. This isn't a trivial upgrade, though, with the modules we're using.

2 - Rewrite the factor submission script without the use of an external verification program. The "random" behavior only comes out when Perl tries to invoke an external process. There are large-integer modules for Perl we can use to avoid having to start a new process. So far I haven't seen any problems or strange behavior with internal Perl code.

Unfortunately I can't do either of these tonight, but we should be able to do #1 by the weekend. If we're still having problems then, we'll look at rewriting the script.

Until then, keep track of your unverified factors so they can be submitted later. You can keep trying the script if you want; the worst it can do is reject them.

Sorry!