tail bug - starting in 7.5 "tail --follow=name" behaves like "tail --follow=name --retry"

[Tim Underwood]

Going from Ubuntu 10.04 (coreutils 7.4) to Ubuntu 10.10 (coreutils 8.5) I
noticed that "tail --follow=name" started behaving like "tail --follow=name
--retry".  It looks like the issue started in 7.5 and still exists in 8.9.

To reproduce:

tail --follow=name this_file_does_not_exist

The expected behavior is:

$ ./coreutils-7.4/src/tail --follow=name this_file_does_not_exist
./coreutils-7.4/src/tail: cannot open `this_file_does_not_exist' for
reading: No such file or directory
./coreutils-7.4/src/tail: no files remaining

The wrong behavior is:

$ ./coreutils-7.5/src/tail --follow=name this_file_does_not_exist
./coreutils-7.5/src/tail: cannot open `this_file_does_not_exist' for
reading: No such file or directory
<tail waits forever for this_file_does_not_exist to become available which
is what --retry is for>

Here's the wrong behavior on 8.9:

$ ./coreutils-8.9/src/tail --follow=name this_file_does_not_exist
./coreutils-8.9/src/tail: cannot open `this_file_does_not_exist' for
reading: No such file or directory
<waits forever...>

My specific use case is to tail a log file until it gets deleted at which
point tail should exit allowing my script to continue.

-Tim