Re: rhel8 test failure confirmation?

[Zack Weinberg]

On Sat, Dec 2, 2023, at 6:37 PM, Karl Berry wrote:
> The best way to check if high-resolution 
>     timestamps are available to autom4te is to have perl load 
>     Autom4te::FileUtils and check if that also loaded Time::HiRes.
>
> The problem with that turned out to be that Time::HiRes got loaded from
> other system modules, resulting in the test thinking that autom4te used
> it when that wasn't actually the case. That's what happened in practice
> with your patch.

Would it help if we added a command line option to autom4te that made it report 
whether it thought it could use high resolution timestamps? Versions of 
autom4te that didn't recognize this option should be conservatively assumed not 
to support them.

(Of course there's the additional wrinkle that whether high resolution 
timestamps *work* depends on what filesystem autom4te.cache is stored in, but 
that's even harder to probe... one problem at a time?)

zw