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 Beware: some are quite old and no longer valid.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 cp --recursive: use fts and *at functions to perform directory traversals
18 in source and destination hierarchy rather than forming full file names.
19 The latter (current) approach fails unnecessarily when the names
20 become very long, and requires space and time that is quadratic in the
21 depth of the hierarchy. [Bo Borgerson is working on this]
24 Now that gnulib supports *printf("%a"), import one of the
25 *printf-posix modules so that printf(1) will support %a even on
26 platforms where the native *printf(3) is deficient.
27 Suggestion from Eric Blake.
29 renice: POSIX utility, needs implementing.
30 suggestion from Karl Berry (among others).
31 Bob Proulx is working on this.
33 install: add an option to specify the program used to strip binaries.
34 suggestion from Karl Berry
37 Address this comment: FIXME: mv's behavior in this case is system-dependent
38 Better still: fix the code so it's *not* system-dependent.
40 ls: add --format=FORMAT option that controls how each line is printed.
42 cp --no-preserve=X should not attempt to preserve attribute X
43 reported by Andreas Schwab
45 copy.c: Address the FIXME-maybe comment in copy_internal.
46 And once that's done, add an exclusion so that `cp --link'
47 no longer incurs the overhead of saving src. dev/ino and dest. filename
50 Write an autoconf test to work around build failure in HPUX's 64-bit mode.
51 See notes in README -- and remove them once there's a work-around.
53 Integrate use of sendfile, suggested here:
54 http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-fileutils/2003-03/msg00030.html
55 I don't plan to do that, since a few tests demonstrate no significant benefit.
57 Should printf '\0123' print "\n3"?
58 per report from TAKAI Kousuke on Mar 27
59 http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2003-03/index.html
61 printf: consider adapting builtins/printf.def from bash
63 df: add `--total' option, suggested here http://bugs.debian.org/186007
65 tail: don't use xlseek; it *exits*.
66 Instead, maybe use a macro and return nonzero.
68 tr: support nontrivial equivalence classes, e.g. [=e=] with LC_COLLATE=fr_FR
70 lib/strftime.c: Since %N is the only format that we need but that
71 glibc's strftime doesn't support, consider using a wrapper that
72 would expand /%(-_)?\d*N/ to the desired string and then pass the
73 resulting string to glibc's strftime.
75 unexpand: [http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/unexpand.html]
76 printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 8,9 should print its input, unmodified.
77 printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 5,8 should print "x\ty\n"
79 Let GNU su use the `wheel' group if appropriate.
80 (there are a couple patches, already)
82 sort: Investigate better sorting algorithms; see Knuth vol. 3.
84 We tried list merge sort, but it was about 50% slower than the
85 recursive algorithm currently used by sortlines, and it used more
86 comparisons. We're not sure why this was, as the theory suggests it
87 should do fewer comparisons, so perhaps this should be revisited.
88 List merge sort was implemented in the style of Knuth algorithm
89 5.2.4L, with the optimization suggested by exercise 5.2.4-22. The
90 test case was 140,213,394 bytes, 426,4424 lines, text taken from the
91 GCC 3.3 distribution, sort.c compiled with GCC 2.95.4 and running on
92 Debian 3.0r1 GNU/Linux, 2.4GHz Pentium 4, single pass with no
93 temporary files and plenty of RAM.
95 Since comparisons seem to be the bottleneck, perhaps the best
96 algorithm to try next should be merge insertion. See Knuth section
97 5.3.1, who credits Lester Ford, Jr. and Selmer Johnson, American
98 Mathematical Monthly 66 (1959), 387-389.
100 Remove suspicious uses of alloca (ones that may allocate more than
103 Adapt these contribution guidelines for coreutils:
104 http://sources.redhat.com/automake/contribute.html
106 Improve test coverage.
107 See HACKING for instructions on generating an html test coverage report.
108 Find a program that has poor coverage and improve.
110 Changes expected to go in, someday.
111 ======================================
113 dd patch from Olivier Delhomme
115 test/mv/*: clean up $other_partition_tmpdir in all cases
117 ls: when both -l and --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir are
118 specified, consider whether to let the latter select whether to
119 dereference command line symlinks to directories. Since -l has
120 an implicit --NO-dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir meaning.
121 Pointed out by Karl Berry.
123 A more efficient version of factor, and possibly one that
124 accepts inputs of size 2^64 and larger.
126 dd: consider adding an option to suppress `bytes/block read/written'
127 output to stderr. Suggested here:
128 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=165045
130 Pending copyright papers:
131 ------------------------
132 getpwnam from Bruce Korb
134 pb (progress bar) from Miika Pekkarinen
136 ------------------------------
138 Remove long-deprecated options. Search case-insensitive for
139 `deprecated' and `remove in '. Automate this.
141 Add a distcheck-time test to ensure that every distributed
142 file is either read-only(indicating generated) or is
143 version-controlled and up to date.
145 remove `%s' notation (now that they're all gone, add a maint.mk sc_
146 rule to ensure no new ones are added):
147 grep -E "\`%.{,4}s'" src/*.c
149 remove all uses of the `register' keyword: Done. add a maint.mk rule
152 remove or adjust chown's --changes option, since it
153 can't always do what it currently says it does.
155 Adapt tools like wc, tr, fmt, etc. (most of the textutils) to be
156 multibyte aware. The problem is that I want to avoid duplicating
157 significant blocks of logic, yet I also want to incur only minimal
158 (preferably `no') cost when operating in single-byte mode.
160 pr's use of nstrftime can make it malloc a very large (up to SIZE_MAX) buffer
164 Copyright (C) 2002-2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
166 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
167 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
168 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
169 (at your option) any later version.
171 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
172 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
173 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
174 GNU General Public License for more details.
176 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
177 along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.