Re: coreutils 5.95 on IRIX 5.3

[Paul Eggert]

Georg Schwarz <address@hidden> writes:

> It's a toy, not a production machine. I use it for testing code on
> akward systems :-)

Wow, thanks for all the research.

My kneejerk reaction is that since the bug was fixed in IRIX 6.2, last
released in June 1996 and expired in January 2005, then we should
probably just assume that production users have upgraded to a
supported version (namely, IRIX 6.5) as SGI recommends.

> Sometimes problems showing up on such systems can be relevant for
> more modern ones as well.

A similar problem was reported for SunOS 4.1.2, which is far older;
see <http://ftp.arl.mil/ftp/unix-wizards/V16%23048> (1992-10-29).

It is a tricky enough area that I wouldn't be surprised to see it come
up again in a different guise (soft updates, anyone? :-) but it's hard
to think of how coreutils could test for it systematically.  I think
we'll just have to file this one under "fix your kernel please".