Re: [PATCH 0/7] contents of topic/libposix for merge to master

[Paul Eggert]

On 11/12/2010 04:13 PM, Bruno Haible wrote:
> What should we do?
>   a) Patch the test so that it uses a readdir() loop to detect the absence of
>      the file even when stat() pretends it's still present. Or
>   b) Use an rpl_rename override that will make the unit test work.

It's long been well-known that NFS is not POSIX-compliant.
If we start down the path of putting wrappers around NFS to make it 
POSIX-compliant,
we'll have a lot of work to do and a job that will probably never end,
and we'll make coreutils slow down for the common case even though
in practice the problems are rare and users don't care about them.

So, my vote is for (a).  Or maybe even (c): skip the test if it's
running atop NFS.

I've been observing similar test failures for months, by the way, but
haven't bothered to report them, because, hey! it's NFS! of course it's
going to screw up in those cases!