Re: touch and utimens troubles on new/old software combinations

[Andreas Schwab]

Eric Blake <address@hidden> writes:

> I could also work on a patch like this - basically, gnulib/m4/utimens.m4
> could check whether futimens/utimensat fail with ENOSYS, and if so, treat
> them as though they were not declared.  But then you lose the ability to
> adjust timestamps to the nanosecond if you later upgrade your kernel but
> use the existing coreutils build; you would have to reconfigure and
> rebuild coreutils.  So which approach is more desirable?

You would also lose the capability to build on a system with an old
kernel, but new glibc (eg in a chroot), and getting the same result as
if building on the target system.  Runtime configure checks should be
avoided as much as possible, especially if they depend on the kernel
(the only part you cannot replace in a chroot).

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, address@hidden
SuSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstraße 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany
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