Subject: bug#9213: aclocal7.test of automake 1.8.3 fails on s390/s390x

From: Stefano Lattarini <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:51:36 +0200

On Tuesday 16 August 2011, Stefano Lattarini wrote:
> On Monday 15 August 2011, Philipp Thomas wrote:
> > * Stefano Lattarini ([email-masked]) [20110808 23:53]:
> > 
> > > May I ask you whether you've managed to solve your problem?  If yes, I
> > > could close this bug report then.
> > 
> > Sorry for answering so late. It disappeared without me doing anything. So
> > yes, you may close this bug report.
> > 
> > Philipp
> > 
> Thanks for letting me know.  I'm closing the report.
> 
And I think that I've also found out the reason of the failure.  The fact
that you wasn't able to reproduce it made me strongly suspect that it was
one of those spurious, racy failures caused by missing "sleep" calls in
test scripts where the timestamps of input or generated files are very
significant (we have had our good share of such failures in the past).
And in fact, commit `Release-1-9-270-g8952f72' (which follows the 1.8.x
releases) has a ChangeLog entry which reads:

   * tests/aclocal7.test: Add `$sleep's between file touching and automake
   (or aclocal+automake) invocations, to ensure they complete with a time
   stamp strictly later than the touched file.

So it was almost certainly a spurious failure after all, only due to a
testsuite weakness, and you needn't worry about it.

Regards,
  Stefano