Re: Compilation of timezone source with zic fails (on mountpoint) - Mailing list pgsql-bugs

Yes, zic has always attempted to create hard links and it never failed on
our build farm and we haven't changed anything.

The patch given doesn't help. I guess the problem is that in dolink(), the
fromfield value is a directory (path to postgresql/timezone) and hence the
make install fails at following check:
--
fromisdir = itsdir(fromfield);
if (fromisdir)
        {
                char const *e = strerror(fromisdir < 0 ? errno : EPERM);

                fprintf(stderr, _("%s: link from %s/%s failed: %s\n"),
                                progname, directory, fromfield, e);

                exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
        }
--

"fromfield" value should have been the file inside the timezone directory.

On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 10:11 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

> Sandeep Thakkar <sandeep.thakkar@enterprisedb.com> writes:
> > During building of the ongoing PG updates (9.6.1, 9.5.5 to 9.1.24), we
> > found that the build failed for Linux on 9.3 and 9.2 with the following
> > error:
> > ...
> > warning: "./data/backward", line 125: symbolic link used because hard
> link
> > failed: Operation not permitted
> > .*/zic: link from
> > /mnt/hgfs/pginstaller-repo/**server/staging/linux/share/
> postgresql/timezone/US/Eastern
> > failed: Operation not permitted*
> > make[2]: *** [install] Error 1
>
> > On investigating, we found that it was because of the few commits in the
> > new updates related to zic.c which tries to create hard links. These hard
> > links failed to create on our build farm because we were building the
> > source on the mount point (/mnt/hgfs/) where hard links cannot be
> created.
> > The Linux machine is a Virtual Machine hosted on VMware Fusion on the Mac
> > Server and the Fusion doesn't allow to create hard links inside the
> shared
> > location. It errors out with "Operation not permitted". Symbolic links
> can
> > be created though.
>
> I took a closer look at this.  As I said earlier, zic has always attempted
> to use hard links, and now that I look, the fallback to symlinks has been
> there right along as well.  So you were always getting those warnings on
> that platform.  What is new, apparently, is this bit at the end of zic.c's
> main() which came in with tzcode2016c (ie, our *previous* set of releases):
>
>         if (warnings && (ferror(stderr) || fclose(stderr) != 0))
>                 return EXIT_FAILURE;
>
> I cannot reproduce any failure locally by forcing "warnings" on, but I
> speculate that for some reason fclose(stderr) fails on your platform.
>
> We could probably persuade the IANA guys that fclose() is a bad idea here
> and fflush() would be saner.  Could you determine whether "make install"
> passes in that environment if you replace this code with
>
>         if (warnings && (fflush(stderr) != 0 || ferror(stderr)))
>                 return EXIT_FAILURE;
>
> ?
>
> Independently of that, though, I think it's a bad idea to be using such
> an environment as your build platform, because it means you are getting
> different results (different package contents) depending on whether you
> happen to build with the install target directory on that mount or not.
>
>                         regards, tom lane
>



--
Sandeep Thakkar