This came up as part of the discussion of WT-2336. WiredTiger should work on systems that do not support ftruncate. In fact, if HAVE_FTRUNCATE is undef'ed in wiredtiger_config.h, the python test suite runs without issue except for test_compact02.

FERROR in test_compact02.test_compact02.test_compact02 -s 0 (file.default.default)

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FAIL: test_compact02.test_compact02.test_compact02 -s 0 (file.default.default)
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Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/Users/dda/wt/git/wt-2336-test-file-ops.no-ftruncate/test/suite/test_compact02.py", line 148, in test_compact02
self.assertLess(sz, self.fullsize / 2)
AssertionError: 195563520 not less than 68161500

I think this could be fixed in the test case.