Re: rhel8 test failure confirmation?

[Jacob Bachmeyer]

Karl Berry wrote:
> [...]
>    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.
>   

If you can locate Autom4te::FileUtils, grepping it for "Time::HiRes" 
will tell you if autom4te supports sub-second timestamps, but then you 
need more checks to validate that the filesystem actually has sub-second 
timestamps.

A simple check:

if $PERL -I${autom4te_perllibdir:-/usr/share/autoconf} 
-I/usr/local/share/autoconf \
       -MAutom4te::FileUtils -e 'exit defined $INC{q[Time/HiRes.pm]} ? 
0 : 1'; then
   # autom4te uses Time::HiRes
else
   # autom4te does not use Time::HiRes
fi

This method also has the advantage of implicitly also checking that 
$PERL has Time::HiRes installed by determining if loading 
Autom4te::FileUtils causes Time::HiRes to be loaded.  (In other words, 
this will give the correct answer on Perl 5.6 if Time::HiRes was 
installed from CPAN or on later Perls if a distribution packager has 
unbundled Time::HiRes and the user has not installed its package.)

> [...]
> 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.

The Automake testsuite is supposed to test Automake, not Autoconf, so 
working around Autoconf issues is appropriate.  In this case, if always 
using "autoconf -f" allows us to eliminate the sleeps entirely (and does 
not expand the running time of Autoconf too much), we should do that, at 
least in my view.


-- Jacob