Dima Pasechnik

we probably should rather try setting up CI for the Alpine Linux (the musl-based distro which appears to be supported by GH Actions)

> Added testing for Alpine in #40561. > > For me the most important thing to test (and that's why I've created this PR) is the detection of all dependencies...

> > I must say I don't like the sagedistro features creep into the meson build as it happens now (I think @orlitzky is of a similar opinion). > >...

would it be more reasonable to have an optional meson sage-distro, with sagelib a subproject (and the latter can be installable without sage-distro) ?

> Libraries are also found in SAGE_LOCAL by setting the correct compiler flags. pkg-config files are nice as they are more robust, but not essential. actually, having a pkg-config file...

are these compiler warnings meaningful? I see gcc having a long-standing issue with them https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=21161

At least a part of these random bugs in libgap interface are due to missing `volatile` declarations. Newer compilers optimise more of function calls, passing arguments in registers, which get...

> Actually it is not necessary to declare everything volatile, only the local variables that are **changed between `setjmp` and `longjmp`** need to be declared volatile. > > I don't...

these (needing volatile) only started manifest themselves as segfaults (rather than just memory leaks - or perhaps these weren't even memory leaks, and were garbage-collectable by GAP? Or perhaps this...

GAP uses longjmp to handle its errors. Handling nested setjmp/longjmp pairs is fun. See e.g. https://github.com/sagemath/sage/issues/37026 and https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/37951