Re: Obscure test failures on DilOS (OpenSolaris-like) with 8.22.157-1b243

[Jim Meyering]

On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 5:03 PM, Assaf Gordon <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Few tests fail of version 8.22.157-1b243 (and I assume 8.23 now) fail on
> DilOS version 1.3.5.16 .
> (DilOS is Illumos kernel (formally OpenSolaris) with Debian-like packaging
> system: http://www.dilos.org/about-dilos ).
>
> The failure is obscure enough so it's probably not worth fixing, just
> documenting.
>
> On this system,
> When building with GNU make (/usr/gnu/bin/make), make will use GNU Bash
> (/usr/gnu/bin/sh) - and all goes well.
>
> When building with native make (/usr/bin/make), it will use /bin/sh, which
> seems a form of old AT&T sh:
>     $ /bin/sh --version
>     version         sh (AT&T Research) 93t+ 2010-03-05
>
> This shell does not support the "local" keyword for variables, and so few
> tests which have shell functions with the "local" keyword fail.
>
> Example (on said system):
>     $ /usr/gnu/bin/sh -c 'test() { local i=1 ; echo $i ; } ; test'
>     1
>
>     $ /bin/sh -c 'test() { local i=1 ; echo $i ; } ; test'
>     /bin/sh[1]: local: not found [No such file or directory]
>
> ======
>
> The following tests fail:
>     tests/tail-2/inotify-hash-abuse
>     tests/tail-2/F-vs-missing
...

Thank you for the report.
gnulib's tests/init.sh already expends some effort to
find a sensible shell with which to run all of coreutils' tests.

I think the solution is to augment the tests in init.sh to
require support for the "local" keyword as well as the
other non-POSIX features it already tests for.