info/t/dir-dangling-entry.sh hang on netbsd

[Karl Berry]

Hi Gavin - on a netbsd 5.1 system I happen to have access to, the
dir-dangling-entry test hangs (in uninterruptible disk wait; parent
process had to be killed to recover).  Running with sh -vx shows it
hanging in Init-inter.inc:
..
# Wedge open pipe
sleep 10 3>$PTY_TYPE &
+ sleep 10
[no more output]

I don't know if it is related to the problem (I kind of doubt it), but
on this system, mknod is locally compiled from coreutils, while mkfifo
is available as part of core BSD.  I have the impression that mkfifo is
part of POSIX and the mknod utility is not (and hence BSD doesn't
provide it).  E.g., this list (although I don't entirely believe it):
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/idx/utilities.html

So, perhaps it would be better to use mkfifo if it is available, and only
if not, fall back to mknod p (aren't they basically equivalent?).  Or,
simpler, just give up if no mkfifo.  Any system without mkfifo is likely
to be so old so as to have other problems with something as fragile as
pseudottys and named pipes and interactive I/O being done in batch.

Anyway, I don't think it's necessary to actually run the tests on
problematic systems.  But we need to at least detect them and skip the
test, one way or another.

I see that Assaf provides the various bsd systems in his
http://pretest.nongnu.org/ project, so maybe that would be a convenient
way for you to try to reproduce, when you have a chance?  (I could also
ask for access to you to the system I was trying on; that's likely to be
fine, but also likely to take a few days.)

Thanks,
Karl

P.S. This is with the current svn sources.  I made a
texinfo-5.993.tar.xz and then configure && make && make check.