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 Beware: some are quite old and no longer valid.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 Modify chmod so that it does not change an inode's st_ctime
9 when the selected operation would have no other effect.
10 First suggested by Hans Ecke <http://hans.ecke.ws> in
11 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.coreutils.bugs/2920
12 Discussed more recently on <http://bugs.debian.org/497514>.
14 document the following in coreutils.texi:
18 Also document the SELinux changes.
20 Suggestion from Paul Eggert:
21 More generally, there's not that much use for imaxtostr nowadays,
22 since the inttypes module and newer versions of gettext allow things
23 like _("truncating %s at %" PRIdMAX " bytes") to work portably.
24 I suspect that (if someone cares to take the time) we can remove
25 all instances of imaxtostr and umaxtostr in coreutils and gnulib.
27 cp --recursive: use fts and *at functions to perform directory traversals
28 in source and destination hierarchy rather than forming full file names.
29 The latter (current) approach fails unnecessarily when the names
30 become very long, and requires space and time that is quadratic in the
31 depth of the hierarchy. [Bo Borgerson is working on this]
34 Now that gnulib supports *printf("%a"), import one of the
35 *printf-posix modules so that printf(1) will support %a even on
36 platforms where the native *printf(3) is deficient.
37 Suggestion from Eric Blake.
40 Implement the options -P and -L in a POSIX-compatible way.
41 Note the instructions in the initial paragraph of this file
44 renice: POSIX utility, needs implementing.
45 suggestion from Karl Berry (among others).
46 Bob Proulx is working on this.
49 Address this comment: FIXME: mv's behavior in this case is system-dependent
50 Better still: fix the code so it's *not* system-dependent.
52 ls: add --format=FORMAT option that controls how each line is printed.
54 cp --no-preserve=X should not attempt to preserve attribute X
55 reported by Andreas Schwab
57 copy.c: Address the FIXME-maybe comment in copy_internal.
58 And once that's done, add an exclusion so that `cp --link'
59 no longer incurs the overhead of saving src. dev/ino and dest. filename
62 Write an autoconf test to work around build failure in HPUX's 64-bit mode.
63 See notes in README -- and remove them once there's a work-around.
65 Integrate use of sendfile, suggested here:
66 http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-fileutils/2003-03/msg00030.html
67 I don't plan to do that, since a few tests demonstrate no significant benefit.
69 Should printf '\0123' print "\n3"?
70 per report from TAKAI Kousuke on Mar 27
71 http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2003-03/index.html
73 printf: consider adapting builtins/printf.def from bash
75 tail: don't use xlseek; it *exits*.
76 Instead, maybe use a macro and return nonzero.
78 tr: support nontrivial equivalence classes, e.g. [=e=] with LC_COLLATE=fr_FR
80 lib/strftime.c: Since %N is the only format that we need but that
81 glibc's strftime doesn't support, consider using a wrapper that
82 would expand /%(-_)?\d*N/ to the desired string and then pass the
83 resulting string to glibc's strftime.
85 unexpand: [http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/unexpand.html]
86 printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 8,9 should print its input, unmodified.
87 printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 5,8 should print "x\ty\n"
89 Let GNU su use the `wheel' group if appropriate.
90 (there are a couple patches, already)
92 sort: Investigate better sorting algorithms; see Knuth vol. 3.
94 We tried list merge sort, but it was about 50% slower than the
95 recursive algorithm currently used by sortlines, and it used more
96 comparisons. We're not sure why this was, as the theory suggests it
97 should do fewer comparisons, so perhaps this should be revisited.
98 List merge sort was implemented in the style of Knuth algorithm
99 5.2.4L, with the optimization suggested by exercise 5.2.4-22. The
100 test case was 140,213,394 bytes, 426,4424 lines, text taken from the
101 GCC 3.3 distribution, sort.c compiled with GCC 2.95.4 and running on
102 Debian 3.0r1 GNU/Linux, 2.4GHz Pentium 4, single pass with no
103 temporary files and plenty of RAM.
105 Since comparisons seem to be the bottleneck, perhaps the best
106 algorithm to try next should be merge insertion. See Knuth section
107 5.3.1, who credits Lester Ford, Jr. and Selmer Johnson, American
108 Mathematical Monthly 66 (1959), 387-389.
110 Remove suspicious uses of alloca (ones that may allocate more than
113 Adapt these contribution guidelines for coreutils:
114 http://sources.redhat.com/automake/contribute.html
116 Improve test coverage.
117 See HACKING for instructions on generating an html test coverage report.
118 Find a program that has poor coverage and improve.
120 Changes expected to go in, someday.
121 ======================================
123 dd patch from Olivier Delhomme
125 test/mv/*: clean up $other_partition_tmpdir in all cases
127 ls: when both -l and --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir are
128 specified, consider whether to let the latter select whether to
129 dereference command line symlinks to directories. Since -l has
130 an implicit --NO-dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir meaning.
131 Pointed out by Karl Berry.
133 dd: consider adding an option to suppress `bytes/block read/written'
134 output to stderr. Suggested here:
135 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=165045
137 Pending copyright papers:
138 ------------------------
139 getpwnam from Bruce Korb
141 pb (progress bar) from Miika Pekkarinen
143 ------------------------------
145 Remove long-deprecated options. Search case-insensitive for
146 `deprecated' and `remove in '. Automate this.
148 Add a distcheck-time test to ensure that every distributed
149 file is either read-only(indicating generated) or is
150 version-controlled and up to date.
152 remove `%s' notation (now that they're all gone, add a maint.mk sc_
153 rule to ensure no new ones are added):
154 grep -E "\`%.{,4}s'" src/*.c
156 remove all uses of the `register' keyword: Done. add a maint.mk rule
159 remove or adjust chown's --changes option, since it
160 can't always do what it currently says it does.
162 Support arbitrary-precision arithmetic in those tools for which it
163 makes sense. Factor and expr already support this via libgmp.
164 The "test" program is covered via its string-based comparison of
165 integers. To be converted: seq.
167 Adapt tools like wc, tr, fmt, etc. (most of the textutils) to be
168 multibyte aware. The problem is that I want to avoid duplicating
169 significant blocks of logic, yet I also want to incur only minimal
170 (preferably `no') cost when operating in single-byte mode.
172 pr's use of nstrftime can make it malloc a very large (up to SIZE_MAX) buffer
176 Copyright (C) 2002-2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
178 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
179 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
180 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
181 (at your option) any later version.
183 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
184 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
185 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
186 GNU General Public License for more details.
188 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
189 along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.