Re: [GNU tar 1.34] testsuite: 89 131 132 failed

[Paul Eggert]

On 2023-12-24 20:56, Gordon Steemson wrote:
> I ran the "make installcheck" tests merely as a matter of excessive
> thoroughness, and was therefore quite surprised to get a few failures.
> All three were to do with unreadable directories; either lacking read
> permissions, or simply absent by the time of access.

Thanks for the bug report; this helped us to identify a macOS bug that 
affects many GNU programs, albeit only on artificially-generated files.

Although Apple no longer supports the Darwin 8.11.0 / Mac OS X 10.4.11 
"Tiger" (2007) system that you ran your tests on, I ran the GNU Tar 
tests on Darwin 21.6.0 / macOS 12.6 "Monterey" 21G115 (2022), found some 
of the issues that you mentioned, and fixed them by installing the 
attached patches.

These patches mostly just work around macOS bugs. One of the macOS bugs 
affects GNU Tar, but only on files with artificial timestamps dating 
before 1970; this bug is fixed by the first attached patch, which is to 
Gnulib (which is shared among various GNU packages). Two macOS bugs 
simply cause GNU Tar's test cases to mistakenly report an error, and 
there is one portability bug in the GNU Tar test cases; the remaining 
three patches are to GNU Tar, and fix these bugs.

These fixes should appear in the next release of GNU Tar. In the 
meantime the GNU Tar that you built should be good enough, unless you 
have files with timestamps before 1970.

0001-stat-time-fix-macOS-bug-with-negative-file-times.patch
Description: Text Data

0001-Port-numeric-owner-basic-tests-to-macOS.patch
Description: Text Data

0002-Skip-test-on-macOS-12.6.patch
Description: Text Data

0003-Port-EOF-detection-test-to-macOS.patch
Description: Text Data