Paul Eggert wrote: > On 10/13/2010 12:37 AM, Jim Meyering wrote: > >> What is the server running? > > NetApp 6.5.6. NFS is configured to be NFSv3, running over TCP. > >> First step for that one should be to avoid the warnings from perl, >> e.g., via the patch I suggested. > > Yes, thanks, somehow I missed the patch to tests/misc/ls-misc > that you suggested in > <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2010-10/msg00038.html>. > I just tried it now, and it does fix the perl warnings. > > The problem goes away if I do the build on a local disk, so it does > seem to be specific to NFS. > > I reproduced the problem with the standard RHEL tools, i.e., without > using the newer versions of GCC etc. that I normally use. > > When I strace the make, the bug goes away. This indicates that it's > timing-related, and may be hard to debug. > > Ooo! Ooo! The "timing-related" in the previous paragraph made the > light bulb go on in my head. It's clock skew. The NFS server's > clock is a tiny bit ahead of the NFS client's clock, and so the output > of "ls -l" contains the date, not the time.
Good catch! > I don't see how clock-skew could also explain the test-rename bug noted in > <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2010-10/msg00050.html>, > though. That part of NFS is not supposed to care about clock skew. > > Anyway, the following combined patch fixes the ls-misc failure: ... > Subject: [PATCH] tests: work around portability and clock-skew problems > > * tests/misc/ls-misc (push_ls_colors): Don't assume LS_COLORS > is set. This part of the fix is by Jim Meyering. > (sl-dangle2, sl-dangle3, sl-dangle4, sl-dangle5): Don't assume > that newly-created files will have time stamps in the past. They > might not, due to clock skew, if the file systems are remote. Thanks! I've pushed that.
