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mkdir -p, autoconf



I am chasing a bug in the postgis install phase, found by a bulk build,
while it ran fine on my system -- which happened to have coreutils.
There are a lot of moving pieces in postgis's install becaues it's
autoconf *and* pgxs, but there's one aspect that I want to bring up
here.


autoconf has a macro AC_PROG_MKDIR_P that sets MKDIR_P.  However it is
all paranoid about races, wanting two simultaneous 'mkdir -p foo'
invocations to result in foo being created and neither returning
failure, because...  specculating somehow there are makefiles that don't
serialize that like they do actual build steps, and somehow those
makefiles are not considered buggy?

autoconf rejects NetBSD mkdir -p and thus there is some install-sh and
that would have been ok but this somehow interacts with pgxs and blows
up.

So my real questions are:

  1) Is NetBSD's mkdir -p safe, in that it is immune to
    check for dir
    call mkdir(2) which fails because another mkdir did it in between
    return -1 because that was an error

  I don't see this documented in the (9) manpage.

  2) If so, should we be doing anything about autoconf?

  3) If so or if not, is it reasonable to force ac_cv_path_mkdir to
  /bin/mkdir on NetBSD?
  

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