[issue6896] Intermittent failures in test_mailbox

[Antoine Pitrou]

Antoine Pitrou <pitrou at free.fr> added the comment:

The explanation seems to be that some systems (including RDM's buildbot)
have slightly bizarre mtime behaviour:

$ date && python -c 'import os; os.link("setup.py", "t/c")' && stat t &&
date
Sun Nov  1 09:49:04 EST 2009
  File: `t'
  Size: 144       	Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   directory
Device: 811h/2065d	Inode: 223152      Links: 2
Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x)  Uid: ( 1001/  pitrou)   Gid: ( 1005/  pitrou)
Access: 2009-11-01 09:10:11.000000000 -0500
Modify: 2009-11-01 09:49:03.000000000 -0500
Change: 2009-11-01 09:49:03.000000000 -0500
Sun Nov  1 09:49:04 EST 2009


As you see, the mtime of the directory is set a full one second before
the date at which its contents are modified.
I guess the only safe solution is to explicitly flush the internal cache
when we do any modifications.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue6896>
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