Re: avoid buggy AIX 5.3 cp -R.

[Stefano Lattarini]

[dropping autoconf-patches]

On Saturday 22 January 2011, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> automake/tests/fn99{,subdir}.test have been long-time failures on
> AIX 5.[123], but not 6.1 or newer (and IIRC not 4.3.3 either):
> http://autobuild.josefsson.org/automake/log-201101181921915482000.txt
> 
> | + make distcheck
> |         make  dist-gzip am__post_remove_distdir='@:'
> |         { test ! -d "fn99-1.0"  || { find "fn99-1.0" -type d ! -perm -200 
> -exec chmod u+w {} ';'  && rm -fr "fn99-1.0"; }; }
> |         test -d "fn99-1.0" || mkdir "fn99-1.0"
> | cp: 8???: A file or directory in the path name does not exist.
> | make: 1254-004 The error code from the last command is 1.
> 
> I finally got myself to look at this a bit, and playing around with
> various directory depths and whether there are files in them, I can only
> come to the conclusion that this system's cp -R is simply unusable as it
> corrupts its memory depending on the source tree layout.  I've even got
> it to dump core.
> 
> Any reasons against these two patches, for Autoconf master and Automake
> maint?
> 
> It might be possible to rework the distdir rule to use maybe
>   tar cBf - files | (cd $(distdir) && tar xf -)
> 
> but that opens up its own set of problems (are ACLs copied? is the
> sub-second time stamp handling the same as that of cp?) I'm not eager
> to pursue this unless we see a real-life bug report from somebody who
> needs it to work on AIX.
>
FWIW, I agree it's better to go with the workaround in the testsuite,
especially because, as you said, the bug has been fixed in the latest
AIX version(s) (which I hope means it's also regression-tested, and
won't represent itself easily).

If someone really needs to do a "make dist" on an older AIX, he could
anyway install some version of GNU cp, no?

Thanks,
  Stefano