Re: AIX tests failures

[Jim Meyering]

Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Jim,
>
> * Jim Meyering wrote on Sun, May 28, 2006 at 03:48:21PM CEST:
>> Ralf Wildenhues <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> > With coreutils 5.96, I get three failures on AIX 4.3.3, namely:
>> > cp/fail-perm, rm/inaccessible, help-version.
>
>> > $ env VERBOSE=yes TESTS=help-version make check-TESTS
>> > [...]
>> > + 0< in-2578 1> out-2578
>> > ../../src/dircolors: <internal>:54: unrecognized keyword 
>> > OTHER_WRITABLERITABLE
>> > + echo FAIL: dircolors
>> > FAIL: dircolors
>>
>> Odd, indeed.
>> Does the generated file, dircolors.h, look alright?
...
> ... AIX strndup is severely broken, at least on 4.3.3 and 5.1, similar
> to its strnlen; see also[1].  See for example this test:

Hi Ralf,

Thanks for tracking that down.

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.

Do you feel like writing a patch to coreutils/m4/strndup.m4
that makes it perform a run-test for this bug?