Subject: coreutils-9.2: Failing tests on Adélie Linux

From: "A. Wilcox" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2023 03:20:48 -0500

Hello,

While updating coreutils to 9.2 on Adélie Linux, I’ve run into a few
interesting corner-cases in the test suite.  As a note, our distribution
is using musl as the libc.

1. `tests/misc/csplit-heap.sh` fails when /bin/sh is Bash

I actually saw this on 9.1 as well, but I only saw it on one system and
considered it a fluke since our auto builder infrastructure didn’t see
the issue.  Seeing it again in 9.2 made me look deeper, and it turns out
that when /bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/bash, the test fails with:

./tests/misc/csplit-heap.sh: xmalloc: cannot allocate 16085 bytes

When /bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/dash, the test no longer fails.
However:

2. `tests/misc/tee.sh` fails when /bin/sh is Dash and `make` is run
under Zsh

When running the test suite from my default Zsh environment, and when
/bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/dash, I receive an error when running the
tee test.

If:

- /bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/bash; OR if

- /bin/sh is a symlink to /bin/dash, and
- make is launched from a Bash or Dash shell, *not* a Zsh shell,

Then the test passes.

Both test runs with the respective failures have generated useful log
files, which are attached.  I don’t know if this is actually a bug in
the coreutils test suite, or if the bugs perhaps lie in the shells.

Best,
-A.

--
A. Wilcox (they/them)
SW Engineering: C/C++, DevOps, POSIX
Wilcox Technologies Inc.