automake 1.7.2 & DJGPP: conftest.test & time delays

[Richard Dawe]

Hello.

Windows '95, '98 and ME have some issues with the modification time of files.
This causes the confsub.test to fail, at least on my Windows '98 SE box. The
time delay of two seconds isn't long enough between the before and after
portions of the test. Five seconds seems OK.

Eli Zaretskii described the problem thusly:

"Careful testing demonstrates that ctime might be behind mtime and the system
clock by as much as 3 seconds(!).  The port of GNU Make was printing spurious
warnings about clock time skew until such a change was introduced there that's
how I first learned about this problem).

My guess is that Windows does all those crazy things because ctime has a
100-nanosecond granularity, while mtime has a 2-second granularity.  So they
wanted to prevent the situation where ctime is later than mtime, but their
solution sucks, as always."

Apparently this thread on the DJGPP developers' mailing list discusses the
problem:

http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/mail-archives/browse.cgi?p=djgpp-workers/1998/06/29/13:09:04

Here is a patch and ChangeLog entry for the problem:

2003-01-10  Richard Dawe  <address@hidden>

        *  tests/confsub.test: The granularity of file modification
        times is two seconds on Windows '9x and ME. Wait longer
        than two seconds, before modifying config.hin and running make.

--- /dev/c/develop/ports/orig/automake-1.7.2/tests/confsub.test 2002-09-08
13:07:54.000000000 +0000
+++ /dev/c/develop/ports/gnu.dev/automake-1.7.2/tests/confsub.test 2003-01-08
13:46:30.000000000 +0000
@@ -55,7 +55,7 @@ $AUTOCONF || exit 1
 ./configure || exit 1
 $FGREP 'Before.' subdir/config.h
 
-sleep 2
+sleep 5
 echo 'After.' > subdir/config.hin
 $MAKE || exit 1
 $FGREP 'After.' subdir/config.h || exit 1

Please CC me on any replies, because I'm not subscribed to bug-automake.

Thanks, regards,

-- 
Richard Dawe [ http://www.phekda.freeserve.co.uk/richdawe/ ]