Karl Berry wrote: > The various test-suite.log files show different test failures each > > Yes. Painful. I believe this is due to a timing problem with autom4te, > exposed by Automake using fractional second sleeps according to what the > filesystem supports. It is fixed in the autoconf repository but hasn't > been released. > > I also noted this and asked for help earlier this year. Bogdan and > many other contributors looked into it, and Bogdan eventually came up > with a (tiny) patch for autom4te, which Jacob forwarded to autoconf here: > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2023-03/msg00039.html > and it got installed.
Thanks again for explaining. I encountered what I believe is another manifestation of the same bug: In some circumstances, the GNU gettext 'autopoint-3' test fails. More exactly, an 'automake -a -c' invocation fails with the error messages: PREFIX/share/automake-1.16/am/depend2.am: error: am__fastdepCC does not appear in AM_CONDITIONAL PREFIX/share/automake-1.16/am/depend2.am: The usual way to define 'am__fastdepCC' is to add 'AC_PROG_CC' PREFIX/share/automake-1.16/am/depend2.am: to 'configure.ac' and run 'aclocal' and 'autoconf' again PREFIX/share/automake-1.16/am/depend2.am: error: AMDEP does not appear in AM_CONDITIONAL PREFIX/share/automake-1.16/am/depend2.am: The usual way to define 'AMDEP' is to add one of the compiler tests PREFIX/share/automake-1.16/am/depend2.am: AC_PROG_CC, AC_PROG_CXX, AC_PROG_OBJC, AC_PROG_OBJCXX, PREFIX/share/automake-1.16/am/depend2.am: AM_PROG_AS, AM_PROG_GCJ, AM_PROG_UPC PREFIX/share/automake-1.16/am/depend2.am: to 'configure.ac' and run 'aclocal' and 'autoconf' again This is with Automake 1.16.5 and Autoconf 2.71 on an ext4 file system. The failures occur with probability of ca. 36%. When I add an 'rm -rf autom4te.cache' command before 'automake -a -c', the failures disappear. This is consistent with the analysis from https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/automake/2023-03/msg00039.html "Bogdan appears to have traced the issue to autom4te caching". Until a new Autoconf release is public, I'll go with this workaround to remove the autom4te.cache before invoking automake. Bruno
