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 Beware: some are quite old and no longer valid.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 See if we can be consistent about where --verbose sends its output:
50 These all send --verbose output to stdout:
51 head, tail, rm, cp, mv, ln, chmod, chown, chgrp, install, ln
52 These send it to stderr:
54 shred must write --verbose output to stderr
57 Write an autoconf test to work around build failure in HPUX's 64-bit mode.
58 See notes in README -- and remove them once there's a work-around.
60 Integrate use of sendfile, suggested here:
61 http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-fileutils/2003-03/msg00030.html
62 I don't plan to do that, since a few tests demonstrate no significant benefit.
64 Should printf '\0123' print "\n3"?
65 per report from TAKAI Kousuke on Mar 27
66 http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2003-03/index.html
68 printf: consider adapting builtins/printf.def from bash
70 df: add `--total' option, suggested here http://bugs.debian.org/186007
72 seq: give better diagnostics for invalid formats:
73 e.g. no or too many % directives
74 seq: consider allowing format string to contain no %-directives
76 tail: don't use xlseek; it *exits*.
77 Instead, maybe use a macro and return nonzero.
79 tr: support nontrivial equivalence classes, e.g. [=e=] with LC_COLLATE=fr_FR
81 lib/strftime.c: Since %N is the only format that we need but that
82 glibc's strftime doesn't support, consider using a wrapper that
83 would expand /%(-_)?\d*N/ to the desired string and then pass the
84 resulting string to glibc's strftime.
86 unexpand: [http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/unexpand.html]
87 printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 8,9 should print its input, unmodified.
88 printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 5,8 should print "x\ty\n"
90 Let GNU su use the `wheel' group if appropriate.
91 (there are a couple patches, already)
93 sort: Investigate better sorting algorithms; see Knuth vol. 3.
95 We tried list merge sort, but it was about 50% slower than the
96 recursive algorithm currently used by sortlines, and it used more
97 comparisons. We're not sure why this was, as the theory suggests it
98 should do fewer comparisons, so perhaps this should be revisited.
99 List merge sort was implemented in the style of Knuth algorithm
100 5.2.4L, with the optimization suggested by exercise 5.2.4-22. The
101 test case was 140,213,394 bytes, 426,4424 lines, text taken from the
102 GCC 3.3 distribution, sort.c compiled with GCC 2.95.4 and running on
103 Debian 3.0r1 GNU/Linux, 2.4GHz Pentium 4, single pass with no
104 temporary files and plenty of RAM.
106 Since comparisons seem to be the bottleneck, perhaps the best
107 algorithm to try next should be merge insertion. See Knuth section
108 5.3.1, who credits Lester Ford, Jr. and Selmer Johnson, American
109 Mathematical Monthly 66 (1959), 387-389.
111 cp --recursive: perform dir traversals in source and dest hierarchy rather
112 than forming full file names. The latter (current) approach fails
113 unnecessarily when the names become very long.
115 Remove suspicious uses of alloca (ones that may allocate more than
118 Adapt these contribution guidelines for coreutils:
119 http://sources.redhat.com/automake/contribute.html
122 Changes expected to go in, someday.
123 ======================================
125 dd patch from Olivier Delhomme
127 test/mv/*: clean up $other_partition_tmpdir in all cases
129 ls: when both -l and --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir are
130 specified, consider whether to let the latter select whether to
131 dereference command line symlinks to directories. Since -l has
132 an implicit --NO-dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir meaning.
133 Pointed out by Karl Berry.
135 A more efficient version of factor, and possibly one that
136 accepts inputs of size 2^64 and larger.
138 dd: consider adding an option to suppress `bytes/block read/written'
139 output to stderr. Suggested here:
140 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=165045
142 Pending copyright papers:
143 ------------------------
144 ls --color: Ed Avis' patch to suppress escape sequences for
145 non-highlighted files
147 getpwnam from Bruce Korb
149 pb (progress bar) from Miika Pekkarinen
151 ------------------------------
153 Remove long-deprecated options. Search case-insensitive for
154 `deprecated' and `remove in '. Automate this.
156 Add a distcheck-time test to ensure that every distributed
157 file is either read-only(indicating generated) or is
158 version-controlled and up to date.
160 Implement Ulrich Drepper's suggestion to use getgrouplist rather
161 than getugroups. This affects only `id', but makes a big difference
162 on systems with many users and/or groups, and makes id usable once
163 again on systems where access restrictions make getugroups fail.
164 But first we'll need a run-test (either in an autoconf macro or at
165 run time) to avoid the segfault bug in libc-2.3.2's getgrouplist.
166 In that case, we'd revert to using a new (to-be-written) getgrouplist
167 module that does most of what `id' already does. Or just avoid the
168 buggy use of getgrouplist by never passing it a buffer of length zero.
169 See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=200327
171 remove `%s' notation (now that they're all gone, add a Makefile.maint sc_
172 rule to ensure no new ones are added):
173 grep -E "\`%.{,4}s'" src/*.c
175 remove all uses of the `register' keyword: Done. add a Makefile.maint rule
178 remove or adjust chown's --changes option, since it
179 can't always do what it currently says it does.
181 Adapt tools like wc, tr, fmt, etc. (most of the textutils) to be
182 multibyte aware. The problem is that I want to avoid duplicating
183 significant blocks of logic, yet I also want to incur only minimal
184 (preferably `no') cost when operating in single-byte mode.
186 pr's use of nstrftime can make it malloc a very large (up to SIZE_MAX) buffer
188 ls.c: use gettime rather than clock_gettime, gettimeofday, time
192 Copyright (C) 2002-2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
194 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
195 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
196 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
197 (at your option) any later version.
199 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
200 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
201 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
202 GNU General Public License for more details.
204 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
205 along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.