Re: [PATCH] ci: avoid ubuntu:rolling in most jobs for now

From: Colin Stagner <ask+git@howdoi.land>
Date: Feb 7, 2026, 05:35 UTC
Message-ID: <aac216f7-5d3a-47a9-aaee-5ea3a330fc95@howdoi.land>
In-Reply-To: <xmqq343dcfsy.fsf@gitster.g>

On 2/6/26 22:56, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

>> +	if test -x /usr/bin/gnudirname
>> +	then
>> +		ln -sfT /usr/bin/gnudirname /usr/bin/dirname
> "-T" is somewhat exotic, certainly outside POSIX, and is not needed
> in this case, no?

Correct, this works just fine without it. You can omit it.

When requesting an ln, I usually know and specify both filenames exactly. I do not desire directory behavior as I might for cp or mv. -T / --no-target-directory is useful for this, if perhaps non-portable.

The coreutils info docs [1] highlight an interesting race condition that is avoided by --no-target-directory:

   when the command ‘mv /tmp/source /tmp/dest’ succeeds,
   there is no guarantee that /tmp/source was renamed
   to /tmp/dest: it could have been renamed to
   /tmp/dest/source ...  if mv -T /tmp/source /tmp/dest
   succeeds, there is no question that /tmp/source was
   renamed to /tmp/dest.

but I avoid writing to /tmp itself with anything other than mktemp or rm, for this very reason.

[1]: https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/Target-directory.html