GNU bug report logs - #7389
rename() over NFS

Previous Next

Package: coreutils;

Reported by: Bruno Haible <bruno <at> clisp.org>

Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2010 11:55:02 UTC

Severity: normal

Tags: patch

Merged with 7394

Full log


View this message in rfc822 format

From: Bruno Haible <bruno <at> clisp.org>
To: eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu, 7389 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Cc: bug-gnulib <at> gnu.org, Eric Blake <eblake <at> redhat.com>, "Gary V. Vaughan" <gary <at> gnu.org>
Subject: bug#7389: rename() over NFS
Date: Sat, 13 Nov 2010 12:58:56 +0100
[bug-coreutils readers: This is a reply to
 <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2010-11/msg00155.html>].

Paul Eggert wrote:
> > What should we do?
> >   a) Patch the test so that it uses a readdir() loop to detect the absence of
> >      the file even when stat() pretends it's still present. Or
> >   b) Use an rpl_rename override that will make the unit test work.
> 
> It's long been well-known that NFS is not POSIX-compliant.
> If we start down the path of putting wrappers around NFS to make it POSIX-compliant,
> we'll have a lot of work to do and a job that will probably never end,
> and we'll make coreutils slow down for the common case even though
> in practice the problems are rare and users don't care about them.
> 
> So, my vote is for (a).  Or maybe even (c): skip the test if it's
> running atop NFS.
> 
> I've been observing similar test failures for months, by the way, but
> haven't bothered to report them, because, hey! it's NFS! of course it's
> going to screw up in those cases!

But NFS is widely used, in small networks of 2 to 50 Linux/Unix machines.
Users are running shell scripts in such situations, with lots of coreutils
commands.

Bruno




This bug report was last modified 12 years and 317 days ago.

Previous Next


GNU bug tracking system
Copyright (C) 1999 Darren O. Benham, 1997,2003 nCipher Corporation Ltd, 1994-97 Ian Jackson.