Re: coreutils-8.2 misc/ls-time test failure

[Eric Blake]

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According to Eric Blake on 12/17/2009 5:16 PM:
> Jim Meyering <jim <at> meyering.net> writes:
> 
>>> Sounds quite hairy.  Any ideas for improvements?
>> Thanks for investigating and scoping out the solution.
>> I agree that it sounds hairy, but it also sounds like the required approach.
> 
> So, here we go in three steps; maybe they are worth squashing into one when I 
> finally apply (I'm still running tests on more platforms, first, in case any 
> other gotchas pop up).  I also still need to report this to lkml.

On further investigation, the problem doesn't appear to be quite as
pervasive as I thought.  It only happens when mtime is UTIME_OMIT; that
is, when the call is only requesting a change in atime.  It appears that
what the kernel is doing is treating it like read(), which modifies atime
but not ctime.  The behavior is still a bug, but it means my patch is not
quite right (the test only tried UTIME_OMIT on the atime, so it wasn't
triggering the bug, and the workaround doesn't need to worry about
UTIME_NOW or about atime, just mtime).

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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