Re: autotest vs. in-use directories

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Eric,

it's really sad that, while Cygwin adds POSIX-like functionality, it
seems it always only gets it half-right, and that then requires other
hacks in other tools to work around the remaining deficiencies.  :-/

* Eric Blake wrote on Thu, Apr 09, 2009 at 07:21:58PM CEST:
> So I'm thinking about applying this patch.  Rather than changing
> autoconf's testsuite to use 'exec ./run' (which does indeed make the
> failing tests once again pass for cygwin 1.7, but doesn't help the
> interactive user who won't want to end their session by using exec), I
> decided to fix autotest to quit trying to remove the entire directory,
> but instead only remove its contents.  I believe I got the glob
> correct for deleting all hidden files but not '.' nor '..'.

> +    rm -fr "$at_group_dir"/* "$at_group_dir"/.[!.] "$at_group_dir"/.??* ||

Just for safety, I'd remove the directory last.  Also, why is this not
sufficient?
   rm -fr "$at_group_dir"/* "$at_group_dir"/.[!.]* || ...

since this is only globbing, not regular expressions.

However, there are also other issues.  For example, I test Libtool on
AIX on an NFS system.  AIX keeps some shared libraries (with sufficient
permissions) in memory even after all programs loading them have exited,
in order to be able to start new programs faster that use them too.
Unloading the libraries can only be done by root, which I am not.

This causes "interesting" errors when rerunning tests.  I have not yet
checked whether your patch would help or hurt this situation.

Cheers,
Ralf