Re: test-binary-io unit test failure under MingW + fix patches

[Bruno Haible]

Hello David,

> This should now be in plain text.

It is. Thanks.

> Here are the requested details about my specific setup.  It is a
> standard MinGW install (mingw-get-inst-20110211.exe) using the
> pre-packaged repository catalogs and MSYS.
> ...
>  - 50GB NTFS partition on a local SATA drive
> ...
> GCC: gcc version 4.5.2 (GCC) [Target: mingw32]
> LD: GNU ld (GNU Binutils) 2.21
> Make: GNU Make 3.81 (i686-pc-msys)
> MinGW version from _mingw.h: 3.18

This is very bizarre. I can't reproduce the failure.

I created a testdir with
$ ./gnulib-tool --create-testdir --with-tests --dir=/tmp/testdir poll,
transferred that testdir to a Windows XP machine (also NTFS file system),
and the test-binary-io.sh test succeeds, both in MSYS (with an older mingw,
running inside the MSYS provided 'rxvt') and Cygwin.

What should we do about this now? Given that MSYS is not a recommended
environment (because of the hacks that it does in the command-line argument
processing, and because of the pipe handling bugs it has when running inside
rxvt), I'd propose to just add a comment to test-binary-io.sh stating that
this test may fail on MSYS. What do you think?

Bruno
-- 
In memoriam Otto Freundlich <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Freundlich>