Question

Not sure what the above error means. I just installed ghmm on my mac and get this error every time I do a import ghmm. I do not get this message on my ghmm install on my linux machine and other than that all functions appear to be fine.

I wondering if anyone has seen this before and if there’s anything I can do to get rid of this. The only thing I did different between the two installs was the autogen.sh file was refering to “libtoolize” which doesn’t exist on my mac so I changed it to its replacement “glibtoolize” which allowed it to compile and install fine.

Any suggestions on what this error actually means(and hopefully how I can solve it) would be great.

(I couldn’t find the answer on google but this program does not appear to be specific to ghmm)

Answer 1

I’m willing to be corrected on this, but at a guess I’d say this has nothing to do directly with ghmm or your compile tools. I think the error message you’re seeing is coming from the BSD random number functions that OSX uses (they are documented here).

Assuming that ghmm is causing the warning (and not python), it might be possible to configure the build process to use plain old rand or some other PRNG. Alternatively, maybe you can find the right place to add a call to initstate() (see above doc link) to provide the state information it wants.

This bit from the man page probably points to your problem:

If initstate() is called with less than 8 bytes of state information, or if setstate() detects that the state information has been garbled, error messages are printed on the standard error output.