1 If you're interested in helping, here are some tasks that we've considered
2 over the years. Beware: some are quite old and no longer valid. To avoid
3 wasting your time by duplicating work or by working on a task that is no
4 longer pertinent, please search the mailing list and post your intent
5 before embarking on a big project.
7 ==================================================
8 document the following in coreutils.texi:
15 Also document the SELinux changes.
17 comm: add an option, --output-delimiter=STR
18 Files to change: src/comm.c, ChangeLog, NEWS, doc/coreutils.texi,
19 Add a new file, tests/misc/comm (use another file in that directory as
20 a template), to exercise the new option. Suggestion from Dan Jacobson.
23 Now that gnulib supports *printf("%a"), import one of the
24 *printf-posix modules so that printf(1) will support %a even on
25 platforms where the native *printf(3) is deficient.
26 Suggestion from Eric Blake.
28 renice: POSIX utility, needs implementing.
29 suggestion from Karl Berry (among others).
30 Bob Proulx is working on this.
32 install: add an option to specify the program used to strip binaries.
33 suggestion from Karl Berry
36 Address this comment: FIXME: mv's behavior in this case is system-dependent
37 Better still: fix the code so it's *not* system-dependent.
39 ls: add --format=FORMAT option that controls how each line is printed.
41 cp --no-preserve=X should not attempt to preserve attribute X
42 reported by Andreas Schwab
44 copy.c: Address the FIXME-maybe comment in copy_internal.
45 And once that's done, add an exclusion so that `cp --link'
46 no longer incurs the overhead of saving src. dev/ino and dest. filename
49 Write an autoconf test to work around build failure in HPUX's 64-bit mode.
50 See notes in README -- and remove them once there's a work-around.
52 Integrate use of sendfile, suggested here:
53 http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-fileutils/2003-03/msg00030.html
54 I don't plan to do that, since a few tests demonstrate no significant benefit.
56 Should printf '\0123' print "\n3"?
57 per report from TAKAI Kousuke on Mar 27
58 http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2003-03/index.html
60 printf: consider adapting builtins/printf.def from bash
62 df: add `--total' option, suggested here http://bugs.debian.org/186007
64 seq: consider allowing format string to contain no %-directives
66 tail: don't use xlseek; it *exits*.
67 Instead, maybe use a macro and return nonzero.
69 tr: support nontrivial equivalence classes, e.g. [=e=] with LC_COLLATE=fr_FR
71 lib/strftime.c: Since %N is the only format that we need but that
72 glibc's strftime doesn't support, consider using a wrapper that
73 would expand /%(-_)?\d*N/ to the desired string and then pass the
74 resulting string to glibc's strftime.
76 unexpand: [http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/unexpand.html]
77 printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 8,9 should print its input, unmodified.
78 printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 5,8 should print "x\ty\n"
80 Let GNU su use the `wheel' group if appropriate.
81 (there are a couple patches, already)
83 sort: Investigate better sorting algorithms; see Knuth vol. 3.
85 We tried list merge sort, but it was about 50% slower than the
86 recursive algorithm currently used by sortlines, and it used more
87 comparisons. We're not sure why this was, as the theory suggests it
88 should do fewer comparisons, so perhaps this should be revisited.
89 List merge sort was implemented in the style of Knuth algorithm
90 5.2.4L, with the optimization suggested by exercise 5.2.4-22. The
91 test case was 140,213,394 bytes, 426,4424 lines, text taken from the
92 GCC 3.3 distribution, sort.c compiled with GCC 2.95.4 and running on
93 Debian 3.0r1 GNU/Linux, 2.4GHz Pentium 4, single pass with no
94 temporary files and plenty of RAM.
96 Since comparisons seem to be the bottleneck, perhaps the best
97 algorithm to try next should be merge insertion. See Knuth section
98 5.3.1, who credits Lester Ford, Jr. and Selmer Johnson, American
99 Mathematical Monthly 66 (1959), 387-389.
101 cp --recursive: perform dir traversals in source and dest hierarchy rather
102 than forming full file names. The latter (current) approach fails
103 unnecessarily when the names become very long.
105 Remove suspicious uses of alloca (ones that may allocate more than
108 Adapt these contribution guidelines for coreutils:
109 http://sources.redhat.com/automake/contribute.html
112 Changes expected to go in, someday.
113 ======================================
115 dd patch from Olivier Delhomme
117 test/mv/*: clean up $other_partition_tmpdir in all cases
119 ls: when both -l and --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir are
120 specified, consider whether to let the latter select whether to
121 dereference command line symlinks to directories. Since -l has
122 an implicit --NO-dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir meaning.
123 Pointed out by Karl Berry.
125 A more efficient version of factor, and possibly one that
126 accepts inputs of size 2^64 and larger.
128 dd: consider adding an option to suppress `bytes/block read/written'
129 output to stderr. Suggested here:
130 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=165045
132 Pending copyright papers:
133 ------------------------
134 getpwnam from Bruce Korb
136 pb (progress bar) from Miika Pekkarinen
138 ------------------------------
140 Remove long-deprecated options. Search case-insensitive for
141 `deprecated' and `remove in '. Automate this.
143 Add a distcheck-time test to ensure that every distributed
144 file is either read-only(indicating generated) or is
145 version-controlled and up to date.
147 Implement Ulrich Drepper's suggestion to use getgrouplist rather than
148 getugroups. This affects both `id' and `setuidgid', but makes a big
149 difference on systems with many users and/or groups, and makes id usable
150 once again on systems where access restrictions make getugroups fail.
151 But first we'll need a run-test (either in an autoconf macro or at
152 run time) to avoid the segfault bug in libc-2.3.2's getgrouplist.
153 In that case, we'd revert to using a new (to-be-written) getgrouplist
154 module that does most of what `id' already does. Or just avoid the
155 buggy use of getgrouplist by never passing it a buffer of length zero.
156 See http://bugzilla.redhat.com/200327
158 remove `%s' notation (now that they're all gone, add a Makefile.maint sc_
159 rule to ensure no new ones are added):
160 grep -E "\`%.{,4}s'" src/*.c
162 remove all uses of the `register' keyword: Done. add a Makefile.maint rule
165 remove or adjust chown's --changes option, since it
166 can't always do what it currently says it does.
168 Adapt tools like wc, tr, fmt, etc. (most of the textutils) to be
169 multibyte aware. The problem is that I want to avoid duplicating
170 significant blocks of logic, yet I also want to incur only minimal
171 (preferably `no') cost when operating in single-byte mode.
173 pr's use of nstrftime can make it malloc a very large (up to SIZE_MAX) buffer
177 Copyright (C) 2002-2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
179 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
180 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
181 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
182 (at your option) any later version.
184 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
185 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
186 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
187 GNU General Public License for more details.
189 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
190 along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.