Re: coreutils-6.9.90 released

[Greg Schafer]

Jim Meyering wrote:

> Coreutils version 6.9.90 has been released.

Thanks for your efforts.

> Since the lzma-compressed tarball is 2GB smaller than the .bz2 one,
> and since it decompresses twice as fast, I no longer create bzip2-
> compressed tarballs.

Ugh. Fair enough on promoting lzma, but -1 on dropping bzip2 altogether.

> ** New build options
> 
>   By default, "make install" no longer attempts to install (or even build) su.
>   To change that, use ./configure --enable-install-program=su.
>   If you also want to install the new "arch" program, do this:
>   ./configure --enable-install-program=arch,su.

I actually prefer `su' from Coreutils so I'm glad it can still be
installed. However, I notice a difference from 6.9 where installation of
`su' was skipped when there was insufficient access. Now it just gets
installed anyway (with a missing setuid bit).

>   You can inhibit the compilation and installation of selected programs
>   at configure time.  For example, to avoid installing "hostname" and
>   "uptime", use ./configure --enable-no-install-program=hostname,uptime
>   Note: currently, "make check" passes, even when arch and su are not
>   built (that's the new default).  However, if you inhibit the building
>   and installation of other programs, don't be surprised if some parts
>   of "make check" fail.

Why break the test suite intentionally? This will likely bite a lot of
folks and become a FAQ. I prefer to omit `kill' and `uptime' so now `make
check' chokes thusly:

        done;                                           \
        exit $status
36a37
> kill
91a93
> uptime
make[2]: *** [check-x-vs-1] Error 1


Forcing everyone to use `make -k check' is not ideal IMHO. It would be
nice if `--enable-no-install-program' could be made to play nicely with
the test suite.

BTW, I'm seeing 1 failure here in the gnulib testsuite:

Finding www.gnu.org service http...
res -3: Temporary failure in name resolution
Finding www.ibm.com service https...
res -3: Temporary failure in name resolution
Finding microsoft.com service http...
res -3: Temporary failure in name resolution
Finding google.org service ldap...
res -3: Temporary failure in name resolution
FAIL: test-getaddrinfo

It's clearly due to a missing `/etc/resolv.conf'. This is in the context
of building up a new system inside a chroot environment where not
everything is set up yet. It would be nice if this test could be skipped
when there is no network.

Regards
Greg