mount point created if automount map is empty during daemon startup?

[Tom Georgoulias <tom.georgoulias@freescale.com>]

Ran into an issue today where many of my systems running autofs4 do not 
have a mount point for one my automount maps.  The map in question, 
auto.sync, has existed since mid-March but remained empty until last 
week when an entry was added to create the /sync/caches mount.  Is this 
expected behavior or do I have a misconfiguration or bug on my hands?

hatfield12:tomg$ ypcat -k auto.sync
cache duncan:/vol/vol02/sync_caches/&
hatfield12:tomg$ ls -ld /sync
ls: /sync: No such file or directory
hatfield12:tomg$ /sbin/service autofs status | grep sync
/usr/sbin/automount /sync yp auto.sync -rw,hard,intr rsize=32768,wsize=32768

I am running an RPM of autofs-4.1.1 with several patches from the 
mailing list and from Red Hat.  From the changelog:

* Wed Mar 31 2004 Tom Georgoulias <tom.georgoulias@motorola.com> - 
1:4.1.1-3t
- patch to send HUP during reload (from autofs list)
- patch to clarify direct map doc (from autofs list)
- comment out creation of /net & /misc dirs

* Thu Mar 18 2004 Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com> - 1:4.1.1-3

- Fix bug in get_best_mount, whereby if there is only one option, we
   choose nothing.  This is primarily due to the fact that we pass 0 in to
   the get_best_mount function for the long timeout parameter.  So, we
   timeout trying to contact our first and only server, and never retry.

* Thu Mar 18 2004 Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com> - 1:4.1.1-2

- Prevent startup if a mountpoint is already mounted.

Thanks for any help.

Tom
-- 
Tom Georgoulias
POPI Classification
[x] General Business Information
[] Freescale Semiconductor Internal Use
[] Freescale Semiconductor Confidential Proprietary