Re: choice of file system build-dir can change how coreutils works

[Jim Meyering]

"James Youngman" <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 2/21/07, Andreas Schwab <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Paul Eggert <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>> > This should be a rarer problem, I think, since O_NOFOLLOW is typically
>> > implemented by the operating system, not by the file system, so it
>> > typically either works on all file systems, or works on no file
>> > systems.
>>
>> Even then, the kernel might be different from the one you are building
>> for.
>
> Yes, you can't assume that O_NOFOLLOW is available as a feature just
> because the build system defined it.   Findutils does this:-
...
>          /* Linux kernels 2.1.126 and earlier ignore the O_NOFOLLOW flag. */
...
>          /* FreeBSD 3.0-CURRENT and later support it */

Thanks for the suggestion, but I'm hesitant to add even that little bit of
overhead in support of people who build on a more modern system and hope
the resulting binaries will function properly on systems as old as those.

FreeBSD is up to 6.x and Linux to 2.6.  I don't know about FreeBSD, but
in Linux-land, I'm pretty sure even the security-_un_conscious hobbyist
(who builds packages like coreutils from source) moved off of pre-2.2
Linux a long time ago.