Comment (by Roland Haas):

I just tried and I can successfully build the included h5check in ET_2020_11 on Debian Buster (10) which uses gcc-8.3. I can also build the unmodified tarball h5check_2_0.tar.gz on that system, so as far as I can tell gcc 8.3 should compile it.

Can you please include the exact compiler output as an attachment? Something like:

simfactory/bin/sim build 2>&1 sim | tee make.log 

and then the output (including all errors) will be in make.log. Similarly if you do not use simfactory. Please also include the file configs/sim/config-info which contain all the make options used.

The file h5check_2_0.tar.gz has not changed for 9 years so all releases in that time would show this effect.

Note that having multiple (even identical) typedefs for the same type is indeed an error in C99 (only stops being so in C11). https://stackoverflow.com/a/8595131 In my experience (having assumed it would be ok) the GNU compiler does actually accept it even in C99 (possible b/c C++ does allow it). Are you setting any of the “pedantic” or strict-ansi-conformance options (though even with -pedantic -std=c99I could not make the build fail)?

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Ticket URL: https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/tickets/issues/2492/h5check-fails-to-build