bug#11256: make check problems with coreutils 8.16 and earlier

[Jim Meyering]

Tim Mooney wrote:
> [I'm not subscribed to bug-coretuils, please Cc: me on any relevant
> replies]
>
> Hi All!
>
> I originally reported this issue with GNU coreutils 7.2 in 2009, start
> of the thread is available here
>
>       http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2009-04/msg00182.html
>
> The thread died out without any resolution, unfortunately.
>
> The same issue has happened with every version of coreutils I've built
> since then, including 8.16 that I just tried recently.
>
> I'm using bash (currently 4.2.10) as my login shell.  As mentioned in
> the original thread referenced above, what appears to be happening is
> that bash is being used to run all of the tests, and when my environment
> is loaded the PATH from my environment is causing at least some of the
> tests to get the OS versions of commands, rather than the versions from
> the src directory that should be getting tested.  This causes some painful
> hangs and other general failures.
>
> I have confirmed that if I do
>
>       gmake check VERBOSE=yes SHELL=/usr/xpg4/bin/sh
>
> then the tests perform as expected -- I get four failures and one
> error and quite a number of skips, but no issues with tests hanging
> because it's the OS version of the command being run:
>
> # TOTAL: 477
> # PASS:  393
> # SKIP:  79
> # XFAIL: 0
> # FAIL:  4
> # XPASS: 0
> # ERROR: 1
>
> So, the problem appears to be that the test cases aren't sufficiently
> insulated from the user's environment.

Indeed.  Please send the file, tests/test-suite.log, which
contains details of which tests failed and how.