Re: Intermittent test failures

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hi Ludovic,

* Ludovic Courtès wrote on Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 11:08:39AM CEST:
> FYI the Automake test suite currently fails on Hydra.  The build at
> http://hydra.nixos.org/build/502179 has 5 failures; the one at
> http://hydra.nixos.org/build/502171 has 2 failures, etc.

thanks again for the report.  Can you please check with the system
administrator to find out whether the system has 1s granularity on time
stamps or higher?
  ls -l --full-time

in some directory on the same partition should hopefully answer that,
if coreutils is not borked.

And if better, we need to find out whether perl supports subsecond
granularity and if that is true, whether Automake may have a bug in
not getting/using that information correctly.

If the file system granularity is 1s, then, the next steps are either:

- making sure between start of configure and start of config.status at
  least 1s has passed (i.e., either reinstate the sleep in the sanity
  test or start a background sleep and check that before starting
  config.status)
- or documenting the semantic change, using either $sleep and/or --force
  in the failing tests.

The problem with the latter is that users could run across fairly weird
failures in some situations, because of the way autotools currently deal
with time stamps.

Cheers,
Ralf