Let's look at the history.
Thanks very much for all that research and explanations, Bruno.
Likewise, Jacob.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-automake/2010-10/msg00000.html
Aha, the explanation for some of the $sleep commands scattered
throughout the Automake tests! I had no idea. I'll add a comment at some
point. (I myself added more, in vain attempts to work around the timing
problems, but I don't think they should be necessary, in theory. Not
that I plan to remove them.)
This patch is conservative; IMO safe for a 1.17 release.
I like the idea of a conservative patch, for sure. I see that what
you're doing here is simply omitting the 1 second trial for the sake of
saving that time, in exchange for accepting a 2s delay in the Automake
tests on 1s filesystems. That seems fine to me.
This patch is risky. I think it's safe to commit only if followed
by a 1-month testing period,
I installed your first patch.
where we can see if people report failures
like they were reported in September 2010.
I don't see any reason why the problem would have gone away.
The problem with this patch is that it reverts the change 5) in the
Perhaps the AC_CONFIG_COMMANDS_POST as proposed by Nick and Jacob would
ameliorate that. It doesn't incur any delay on reasonable systems.
I'll reply separately about that. --thanks, karl.
