make check (8.1) hangs forever

[Alan Curry]

The last message I get from "make check" is:
  PASS: misc/help-version

Then it sleeps for a long time. During this time, the inotify-race test is
running. There's a "timeout 10s gdb ..." process that's been running for a
lot longer than 10 seconds.

After ^C stops the make, the timeout, gdb, and a couple of tail processes are
lingering and have to be killed manually.

So far I've looked at it with strace, which revealed that timeout has sent a
SIGTERM to gdb, but gdb has SIGTERM blocked so nothing happens.

This part of the script is doing what it was expected to do:
  tail --pid=$pid -f tail.out | (read; kill $pid)

The kill $pid is executed, but $pid is the timeout process, which responds to
the SIGTERM by passing along a SIGTERM+SIGCONT to gdb, and then waiting for
gdb to die, which never happens. Therefore $pid doesn't die, the tail --pid
never dies, and the script makes no further progress.

It seems this entire script depends, in both the "fail" and "pass" cases, on
the ability to end a gdb process by sending a SIGTERM, which doesn't actually
work.

My gdb is the one from Debian's 6.8-3 package. If necessary, I'll dig into
why it's refusing to deal with SIGTERM.

-- 
Hoping it won't be necessary,
Alan Curry