Re: AIX tests failures

[Jim Meyering]

Albert Chin <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Sun, May 28, 2006 at 07:58:24PM +0200, Jim Meyering wrote:
>> I have to confess that I wonder if it's worth trying to work around
>> bugs in AIX 4.  Is it still officially supported?  Is it used by many?
>> I haven't had access to such a system for a few years now, and no one
>> has been building coreutils on any version of AIX, as far as I've heard.
>> But since it affects 5.1, too, maybe it's worthwhile.
>
> We reported a problem with shred from coreutils-5.2.1 on AIX 5.2 on
> May 13, 2004:
>   http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnu-utils/2004-05/msg00028.html
>
> We're definitely building coreutils on AIX 4.3.3, 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3
> and have customers relying on it.

That was two years ago.
Are you building recent coreutils on all of those systems?
If so, isn't "make check" failing for you, too?

Oh.  I see you'd already diagnosed and worked around the strndup problem.
Did you report that?  There have been mail delivery problems on the
bug-coreutils list.

If people like you exercise new releases and provide feedback about them
(even if just to say "it builds and passes make check on system X.Y.Z")
on older systems, we'll be more likely to spend time integrating patches
to support those systems.

Now that you've said what you're doing, I think that working
around AIX's strndup bug is worthwhile, after all.