Re: Failed: phase compiling: coreutils-5.96-1 failed

[Bob Proulx]

François Giron wrote:
> Here is the new results; one  is the same, and the second with sudo  
> has a good issue:

Thanks for running those.  It looks like the tests are now working for
you.  Was that with or without manual edits to put LC_ALL=C in the
test as requested by Jim's previous message?

> [frangi - 19 juin 2006]coreutils-5.96 % sudo chmod u+rwx tests/ 
> chgrp                13:15
> Password:
> [frangi - 19 juin 2006]coreutils-5.96 % ll -d tests/ 
> chgrp                           13:16
> drwxr-xr-x 10 root admin 340 2006-06-18 21:37 tests/chgrp

[Strange word wrapping is making that hard to understand.]

You appear to have a secondary issue of building sometimes as root and
sometimes not.  When building as root the files are left behind owned
by root and not writable by others.  That is causing secondary
failures which are not expected in that case.  Once you build as root
then you must always build as root.  You appear to ahve built as root
at least once and then tried to run as non-root and ran into this
secondary failure in that case.

Generally when building software from the 'net it is advisable never
to build as root.  Never use sudo to build.  Always build as a
non-root user.  Exceptions to that are very few and can almost always
be handled by using 'fakeroot'.  That will avoid running into this
type of permission problem.  Also it is safer from a system security
point of view.  Software from an outside source can contain attacks
that can be used against your system.  [None in coreutils, of course!]
So unless you know what you are doing you should build as a normal
user to keep the software bundle contained in what it can do to the
system.

That was a general statement for most users.  But coreutils is also
used by root users and does contain a number of tests which
specifically need root access in order to test.  It is very useful for
those tests to be run as root for the purpose of testing specific
coreutils behavior.  This is most useful while developing coreutils
itself though and if you are a developer then there is an expectation
that you know what you are doing.

> [frangi - 19 juin 2006]coreutils-5.96 % sudo env VERBOSE=yes make -C  
> tests/chgrp check TESTS=basic
> ...
> PASS: basic
> ==================
> All 1 tests passed
> ==================

Good to see.

Bob