tl;dr: should we disable alloca in gettext and what's the best way to do this if so?
So msgfmt crashes an insane amount of times on alpha (rough guess is 75% of the time) which is a pain when building other packages. I managed to trace the issue to gettet-runtime/gnulib-lib/malloca.c: freea(), which (from a best guess) passes a stack-pointer to free. I set HAVE_ALLOCA in all config.h files to 0 after make configure and rebuild the package. After that I've seen zero crashes anymore. So apparently gettext butchers their calculations on if the pointer is in a stack (alloca) region or not. Since alloca(3) has a big fat warning on it for reasons other than what I've seen on my alpha station it might be wise to just butcher HAVE_ALLOCA on the port. martijn@
