bug#50784: coreutils 9.0 sometimes gets spurious failures in chmod -R

[Daniel Schepler]

After I upgraded my system (locally built) to coreutils 9.0, I noticed
that my lightly modified sbuild started getting build failures when it
tries to run "chmod -R g+w /<<BUILDDIR>>" (as root) in the chroot.
I'm not sure exactly what combination of files triggers the error, but
I'm able to reproduce it roughly as follows:

cd /tmp
tar -x -f .../coreutils-9.0.tar.xz
cd coreutils-9.0
mkdir obj-x86_64-linux-gnu
cd obj-x86_64-linux-gnu
../configure --prefix=/usr
make -j8
chmod -R u+w /tmp/coreutils-9.0/obj-x86_64-linux-gnu
echo $?

In the last chmod command, there are no failures reported; and even if
I run it under strace, I see no hints of any failed system calls other
than one in access("/etc/ld.so.preload", R_OK) at startup -- and
certainly no failures in the fchmodat() system calls.  Yet the exit
code from the process is 1.

I wasn't seeing any such errors under sbuild using coreutils 8.32.
-- 
Daniel Schepler