Re: rhel8 test failure confirmation?

[Karl Berry]

    I modified my autom4te using the attached patch, 

Thank you very very much for finding this, Bogdan.
I'm glad that Paul has already installed it in Autoconf.
I can't easily confirm it for myself right now, but I'm hopeful.
(Maybe Frederic or others can try with the development autoconf.)

   What can we do about this?

As for automake: can we (you :) somehow modify the computation of the
sleep value to determine if autom4te can handle the HiRes testing or not
(i.e., has the patch installed)? And then use the longer sleep in
automake testing if needed.

In fact, I wonder about autom4te providing an explicit way to test
whether it's been patched, because I suspect that a functionality test
(run autom4te a bunch of times on a bunch of newly-created files) would
be highly susceptible to wrong results. Checking the autom4te
--version number might be the easiest and best thing to do.

I think it's pretty crucial that the automake (or autoconf) tests not
spuriously fail due to filesystem timing, even for people that have the
"old" (unpatched) autom4te. People will certainly keep using current and
older releases of autoconf for years to come.

It seems to me that using autoconf -f or similar is papering over the
problem, so that the tests are no longer testing the normal behavior.
Which does not sound desirable.

Wdyt? --thanks again, karl.