Subject: bug#47935: coreutils: tests/tail-2/inotify-dir-recreate.sh fails on overlayfs

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2021 21:29:09 +0200

Hi Carl,

Carl Dong <[email-masked]> skribis:

> I’m continuing my testing of the 1.3.0 branch, and I’ve found that coreutil's tests/tail-2/inotify-dir-recreate.sh fails on filesystems where tail detects that it cannot use inotify safely (probably arising out of this check: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/34a48bf0f0552aaed21a7dba4a5488946a978317/src/tail.c#L2486-L2491). Example for this: overlayfs used by docker/podman/etc.
>
> The author of tail’s inotify support explains it here: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/5493#issuecomment-598851397

[...]

> Upstream bug filed: https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=47940

With people more on more interested in finally getting ‘core-updates’
merged, now’s a good time to look into this bug.  :-)

In the bug report upstream, you hint at a possible fix.  Could you
provide a patch for this?

Alternatively, if that turns out to be too tricky, can you think of a
workaround, such as skipping the offending code during tests?

Thanks,
Ludo’.