[bug-coreutils readers: This is a reply to <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2010-11/msg00155.html>].
Paul Eggert 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! But NFS is widely used, in small networks of 2 to 50 Linux/Unix machines. Users are running shell scripts in such situations, with lots of coreutils commands. Bruno