It appears we have a fairly major bug in the 1.3 release of the
alpha.  This also exists in current, although we are working on a
fix.

>From the note I've just added to the LAST_MINUTE file of the 1.3
release:

  There is a serious bug in sys/stat.h that causes the alignment
  of struct stat to change when _POSIX_SOURCE is defined, which in
  turn causes some of the return values from stat/fstat/lastat to
  appear to be bogus. (This affects only the alpha.) We are working
  on a fix for this. In the meantime, if you compile a program that
  appears to get wrong the size or time, or possibly other attributes,
  of a file, you are probably being affected by this.

I discovered this when doing an X build; the patch to fix this for
X is as follows:

Index: include/Xosdefs.h
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/xsrc/xc/include/Xosdefs.h,v
retrieving revision 1.1.1.2
diff -u -u -r1.1.1.2 Xosdefs.h
--- Xosdefs.h   1997/06/30 12:45:20     1.1.1.2
+++ Xosdefs.h   1998/01/04 02:48:22
@@ -106,6 +106,10 @@
 #endif
 #endif
 
+#if defined(__NetBSD__) && defined(__alpha__)
+#define X_NOT_POSIX    /* get around struct stat alignment lossage */
+#endif
+
 #ifdef WIN32
 #ifndef _POSIX_
 #define X_NOT_POSIX

cjs

Curt Sampson    cjs@portal.ca	   Info at http://www.portal.ca/
Internet Portal Services, Inc.	   Through infinite mist, software reverberates
Vancouver, BC  (604) 257-9400	   In code possess'd of invisible folly.