chap 6.6 enhancements with better /etc/mtab

[Gilles Espinasse]

Chap 6.6 instruction is to create mtab using

touch /etc/mtab

This cause one coreutils-8.19 test to fail (df/total-unprocessed) and some other to be skipped, sometime for unclear reason when main partition is not XFS like

skip-seek-past-dev: skipped test: failed to determine size of -
SKIP: dd/skip-seek-past-dev
or
slink: skipped test: '.' is on an XFS file system
SKIP: du/slink

. A better and still simple way to create /etc/mtab is using

grep ' / ' /proc/mounts >/etc/mtab

You may consider too adding /proc, /sys, dev/pts, /dev/shm to mtab too. I haven't tested without.

[bdubbs@…]

I don't think we need to try to satisfy every SKIPped test. In some packages, there are many that we cannot ever satisfy (e.g. needs Windows).

In coreutils, there are other tests that are skipped because python is missing, libcap is missing, selinux is missing, attr is missing, the test is disabled by default, Perl's Expect package is not available, arch is not built, valgrind is missing, strace is missing, and a few other miscellaneous items.

Marking WONTFIX.

[Gilles Espinasse]

Don't you have

FAIL: df/total-unprocessed

[bdubbs@…]

Replying to gespinasse:

Don't you have

FAIL: df/total-unprocessed

No, I have

total-unprocessed: skipped test: cannot read table of mounted file systems
SKIP: df/total-unprocessed

[Gilles Espinasse]

I find the reason why that was failing for me. This is related to a different way to set /dev dated from 2007 on our script. After the 'touch /etc/mtab', contrary to LFS,
mount --move /dev /dev1
/dev/null /dev/console are created on dev1
mount --move /dev1 /dev.

That result in an added line in /etc/mtab that would only contain

/dev /dev none rw 0 0

And with that line only in /etc/mtab, TESTS=df/total-unprocessed fail.