Re: coreutils-6.3: spurious stat_dtype failure

[Jim Meyering]

Michael Deutschmann <address@hidden> wrote:
> When testing coreutils-6.3, I observed a make check failure which I have
> judged to be spurious.

Thank you for the report.

> The test was ls/stat_dtype, which verifies that `ls' is using the
> dirent.d_type feature -- which is not provided by all kernels and
> filesystems.  While the test does try to skip systems that don't support
> it, it assumes the feature is available on all ext2 filesystems.  This is
> not so.

I'm not surprised.
I was counting on someone like you to tell me how to
perform the check reliably :-)

> In my case, I'm using the lightweight Linux 2.0.40 kernel, which doesn't
> support that feature for any filesystem type.

> Also, I understand that
> even on a cutting edge kernel, the feature will not be available if the
> given ext2 filesystem was originally formatted for compatibility to old
> kernels.

Can you point to documentation supporting that?

For now, I'll skip the test for linux-2.0.x