On 2025-09-17 09:46, Steffen Nurpmeso wrote:
(Just wondering, the final cp(1) should work for all configurable cases if config succeeds;
That sounds pretty ambitious! The main goal here is merely for coreutils to work on practical platforms.
But that is not via fakeroot?
No, I'm not using fakeroot. I don't recommend using fakeroot for 'configure', for all the usual reasons.
Fakeroot fails to chown but ignores the error, yet the failed system call avoids getting the filestamp updated.
Clearly a bug in fakeroot. POSIX says the file timestamp must be updated.
i do *not* want to be root in the namespace.
That's fine. 'configure' need not be run as root. I don't recommend running it as root.
Having said all that, and fakeroot aside, GNU cp(1) should not exit error if it fails to preserve permissions for a symbolic link
GNU cp does not try to change the permissions of a symlink.
#?0|kent:tmp$ /bin/cp -a xb xc cp: failed to preserve ownership for xc: Operation not supported
That's not preserving permissions; it's preserving ownership. It's a different system call, with quite different semantics.
