Re: touch and utimens troubles on new/old software combinations

[Eric Blake]

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According to Mike Frysinger on 6/2/2008 3:32 PM:
| On Monday 02 June 2008, Andreas Schwab wrote:
|> Mike Frysinger <address@hidden> writes:
|>> also after reading it, i dont think gnu/stubs.h would help in this
|>> particular case.  gnulib would need a runtime test to detect that
|>> utimensat() is actually not available.
|> That should be pretty easy, just fall through to the fallback code when
|> errno == ENOSYS.

I posted a potential patch along those lines:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2008-06/msg00034.html

It incurs the runtime overhead (and unused code bloat on newer systems),
but allows for using the same coreutils binaries even after upgrading a
kernel.

|
| sorry, when i said "runtime test", what i was actually referring to was
| configure doing an AC_TRY_RUN() as that would catch most cases.  if people
| are OK with making the ENOSYS test completely runtime, that would make
| downstream users happier ... not sure about upstream though :).
| -mike

I could also work on a patch like this - basically, gnulib/m4/utimens.m4
could check whether futimens/utimensat fail with ENOSYS, and if so, treat
them as though they were not declared.  But then you lose the ability to
adjust timestamps to the nanosecond if you later upgrade your kernel but
use the existing coreutils build; you would have to reconfigure and
rebuild coreutils.  So which approach is more desirable?

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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