CI coverage reports again experience random fluctuations

[fingolfin]

Consider PR #1254, which touches no source files, yet still coverage changes. Namely in these files: (UPDATE: added more files, marked resolved files)

• hpcgap/src/funcs.c
• src/hpc/threadapi.c
• hpcgap/src/vars.c
• src/compiler.c
• hpcgap/lib/stdtasks.g
• stc/stats.c

It would be good if we could avoid these fluctuations, as they lead to spurious coverage failures.

[ChrisJefferson]

The src/compiler.c issues are to do with us testing compiling mode. There are several layers of problems here:

1. The storeString method doesn't work properly when we use it to handle -U (compiler options) -- it puts a pointer into a char [256], which we then try to parse as a string (that's where the fluctuations come from).

2. Even if we fix it, it turns out we ignore the argument -U anyway, as we manually set the flags in InitKernel anyway.

3. Relatedly, the -i option (set GAP root file) has been broken since at least 4.7.2 (last version I have that compiles), for the same reason.

I suggest, seeing as -U and -i haven't done anything useful for years and no-body cared, just removing them (for the compiler, in practice we know the best options to set, and can just continue hard-wiring them, as always)

[ChrisJefferson]

This first issue (-U) is fixed in #1265. Once that gets merged, we can look to see if there are other issues as well.

[fingolfin]

@ChrisJefferson Great find! I traced this in the logs of the old repository, and the current command line parsing code was introduced 2002-10-23. So, yeah, it should be safe to remove (although at least -i would also be trivial to fix -- but I see no point in that, and freeing up one-letter command line args to me is a good thing).

[fingolfin]

And I just verified that at least -i was already broken in GAP 4.4.12:

~/Documents/gap4r4$ bin/gap.sh  -i lib/init.g
gap: hmm, I cannot find '�_��' maybe use option '-l <gaproot>'?
 If you ran the GAP binary directly, try running the 'gap.sh' or 'gap.bat' script instead.gap>
gap>