coreutils/TODO
2006-08-22 04:00:01 +00:00

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strip: add an option to specify the program used to strip binaries.
suggestion from Karl Berry
doc/coreutils.texi:
Address this comment: FIXME: mv's behavior in this case is system-dependent
Better still: fix the code so it's *not* system-dependent.
ls: add --format=FORMAT option that controls how each line is printed.
cp --no-preserve=X should not attempt to preserve attribute X
reported by Andreas Schwab
copy.c: Address the FIXME-maybe comment in copy_internal.
And once that's done, add an exclusion so that `cp --link'
no longer incurs the overhead of saving src. dev/ino and dest. filename
in the hash table.
See if we can be consistent about where --verbose sends its output:
These all send --verbose output to stdout:
head, tail, rm, cp, mv, ln, chmod, chown, chgrp, install, ln
These send it to stderr:
shred mkdir split
readlink is different
Write an autoconf test to work around build failure in HPUX's 64-bit mode.
See notes in README -- and remove them once there's a work-around.
Integrate use of sendfile, suggested here:
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-fileutils/2003-03/msg00030.html
I don't plan to do that, since a few tests demonstrate no significant benefit.
Should printf '\0123' print "\n3"?
per report from TAKAI Kousuke on Mar 27
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2003-03/index.html
printf: consider adapting builtins/printf.def from bash
df: add `--total' option, suggested here http://bugs.debian.org/186007
seq: give better diagnostics for invalid formats:
e.g. no or too many % directives
seq: consider allowing format string to contain no %-directives
resolve RH report on cp -a forwarded by Tim Waugh
tail: don't use xlseek; it *exits*.
Instead, maybe use a macro and return nonzero.
add mktemp? Suggested by Nelson Beebe
tr: support nontrivial equivalence classes, e.g. [=e=] with LC_COLLATE=fr_FR
lib/strftime.c: Since %N is the only format that we need but that
glibc's strftime doesn't support, consider using a wrapper that
would expand /%(-_)?\d*N/ to the desired string and then pass the
resulting string to glibc's strftime.
sort: Compress temporary files when doing large external sort/merges.
This improves performance when you can compress/uncompress faster than
you can read/write, which is common in these days of fast CPUs.
suggestion from Charles Randall on 2001-08-10
unexpand: [http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/unexpand.html]
printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 8,9 should print its input, unmodified.
printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 5,8 should print "x\ty\n"
Let GNU su use the `wheel' group if appropriate.
(there are a couple patches, already)
sort: Investigate better sorting algorithms; see Knuth vol. 3.
We tried list merge sort, but it was about 50% slower than the
recursive algorithm currently used by sortlines, and it used more
comparisons. We're not sure why this was, as the theory suggests it
should do fewer comparisons, so perhaps this should be revisited.
List merge sort was implemented in the style of Knuth algorithm
5.2.4L, with the optimization suggested by exercise 5.2.4-22. The
test case was 140,213,394 bytes, 426,4424 lines, text taken from the
GCC 3.3 distribution, sort.c compiled with GCC 2.95.4 and running on
Debian 3.0r1 GNU/Linux, 2.4GHz Pentium 4, single pass with no
temporary files and plenty of RAM.
Since comparisons seem to be the bottleneck, perhaps the best
algorithm to try next should be merge insertion. See Knuth section
5.3.1, who credits Lester Ford, Jr. and Selmer Johnson, American
Mathematical Monthly 66 (1959), 387-389.
cp --recursive: perform dir traversals in source and dest hierarchy rather
than forming full file names. The latter (current) approach fails
unnecessarily when the names become very long.
Remove suspicious uses of alloca (ones that may allocate more than
about 4k)
Adapt these contribution guidelines for coreutils:
http://sources.redhat.com/automake/contribute.html
Changes expected to go in, someday.
======================================
dd patch from Olivier Delhomme
Andreas Gruenbacher's xattr changes
Apply Bruno Haible's hostname changes
test/mv/*: clean up $other_partition_tmpdir in all cases
ls: when both -l and --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir are
specified, consider whether to let the latter select whether to
dereference command line symlinks to directories. Since -l has
an implicit --NO-dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir meaning.
Pointed out by Karl Berry.
A more efficient version of factor, and possibly one that
accepts inputs of size 2^64 and larger.
dd: consider adding an option to suppress `bytes/block read/written'
output to stderr. Suggested here:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=165045
Pending copyright papers:
------------------------
ls --color: Ed Avis' patch to suppress escape sequences for
non-highlighted files
getpwnam from Bruce Korb
pb (progress bar) from Miika Pekkarinen
------------------------------
Have euidaccess.m4 check for eaccess as well as euidaccess
If found, then do `#define euidaccess eaccess'.
Remove long-deprecated options. Search case-insensitive for
`deprecated' and `remove in '. Automate this.
Add a distcheck-time test to ensure that every distributed
file is either read-only(indicating generated) or is
version-controlled and up to date.
Implement Ulrich Drepper's suggestion to use getgrouplist rather
than getugroups. This affects only `id', but makes a big difference
on systems with many users and/or groups, and makes id usable once
again on systems where access restrictions make getugroups fail.
But first we'll need a run-test (either in an autoconf macro or at
run time) to avoid the segfault bug in libc-2.3.2's getgrouplist.
In that case, we'd revert to using a new (to-be-written) getgrouplist
module that does most of what `id' already does. Or just avoid the
buggy use of getgrouplist by never passing it a buffer of length zero.
See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=200327
remove `%s' notation:
grep -E "\`%.{,4}s'" src/*.c
remove or adjust chown's --changes option, since it
can't always do what it currently says it does.
Adapt tools like wc, tr, fmt, etc. (most of the textutils) to be
multibyte aware. The problem is that I want to avoid duplicating
significant blocks of logic, yet I also want to incur only minimal
(preferably `no') cost when operating in single-byte mode.
Remove all uses of the `register' keyword
pr's use of nstrftime can make it malloc a very large (up to SIZE_MAX) buffer
ls.c: use gettime rather than clock_gettime, gettimeofday, time
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