Re: autoconf hangs due to autom4te.cache and NFS problem on AIX

[Chris Pickett]

Hi Ralf,

Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> Hi Chris,
>
> Thanks for the report.

No problem... thanks for the software & support.  By the way, about the 
silent/parallel mode for tests, I found the messages you were talking 
about but didn't look further into it... anyway, thanks for the tip.

> * Chris Pickett wrote on Sat, Feb 23, 2008 at 06:56:36AM CET:
> > I don't really know what happened, it just hung, wouldn't respond to 
> > Ctrl-C, and I had to kill it.
>
> Can you reproduce this?  Is it because you killed a previous autoconf
> instance and the cache directory is still locked?

Yes I can reproduce this, and it happens with a fresh version of the 
automake-1.10.1 distribution.

On the other hand, when I try to run autoreconf --install on my actual 
project, it hangs running aclocal and autom4te, although aclocal does 
respond to SIGINT.

Note that I've had autoconf working on this system for about a year, 
this only started happening recently... something changed, somewhere.

If you tell me how to turn on verbose logging I can find the exact part 
where it's hung.

> > I noticed that I couldn't delete my autom4te.cache directory:
> >
> > conftest $ ll autom4te.cache/
> > total 0
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 pickett xxx 0 Feb 23 00:27 .nfsCC131
> >
> > because of that .nfs file.  I don't really know how nfs works 
> > internally, but if I delete that file manually it just comes back.
>
> I suppose you can rename the directory (and delete it as soon as you've
> reset the NFS connection).

It doesn't work.  I have a ~/deleteme directory where I dump stale NFS 
things and periodically attempt to rm -rf, but it can take days for 
things to get released.  I don't have anything more than user 
priviledges, and I don't think the sysadmins have a mandate to work on 
fixing this as long as I have a workaround.

> > The solution is documented in the autom4te manual:
> >
> >    As an example, to disable Autoconf caches (`autom4te.cache')
> > globally, include the following lines in `~/.autom4te.cfg':
>
> That prevents the locking, right.
>
> While we're at telling AIX NFS stories,

My only other AIX (NFS? /bin/sh?) story is that export 
CONFIG_SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash doesn't seem to speed up configure by 
all that much.

Cheers,
Chris