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 Beware: some are quite old and no longer valid.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:
20 Also document the SELinux changes.
22 Suggestion from Paul Eggert:
23 More generally, there's not that much use for imaxtostr nowadays,
24 since the inttypes module and newer versions of gettext allow things
25 like _("truncating %s at %" PRIdMAX " bytes") to work portably.
26 I suspect that (if someone cares to take the time) we can remove
27 all instances of imaxtostr and umaxtostr in coreutils and gnulib.
29 cp --recursive: use fts and *at functions to perform directory traversals
30 in source and destination hierarchy rather than forming full file names.
31 The latter (current) approach fails unnecessarily when the names
32 become very long, and requires space and time that is quadratic in the
33 depth of the hierarchy. [Bo Borgerson is working on this]
36 Now that gnulib supports *printf("%a"), import one of the
37 *printf-posix modules so that printf(1) will support %a even on
38 platforms where the native *printf(3) is deficient.
39 Suggestion from Eric Blake.
41 renice: POSIX utility, needs implementing.
42 suggestion from Karl Berry (among others).
43 Bob Proulx is working on this.
45 install: add an option to specify the program used to strip binaries.
46 suggestion from Karl Berry
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 df: add `--total' option, suggested here http://bugs.debian.org/186007
77 tail: don't use xlseek; it *exits*.
78 Instead, maybe use a macro and return nonzero.
80 tr: support nontrivial equivalence classes, e.g. [=e=] with LC_COLLATE=fr_FR
82 lib/strftime.c: Since %N is the only format that we need but that
83 glibc's strftime doesn't support, consider using a wrapper that
84 would expand /%(-_)?\d*N/ to the desired string and then pass the
85 resulting string to glibc's strftime.
87 unexpand: [http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/unexpand.html]
88 printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 8,9 should print its input, unmodified.
89 printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 5,8 should print "x\ty\n"
91 Let GNU su use the `wheel' group if appropriate.
92 (there are a couple patches, already)
94 sort: Investigate better sorting algorithms; see Knuth vol. 3.
96 We tried list merge sort, but it was about 50% slower than the
97 recursive algorithm currently used by sortlines, and it used more
98 comparisons. We're not sure why this was, as the theory suggests it
99 should do fewer comparisons, so perhaps this should be revisited.
100 List merge sort was implemented in the style of Knuth algorithm
101 5.2.4L, with the optimization suggested by exercise 5.2.4-22. The
102 test case was 140,213,394 bytes, 426,4424 lines, text taken from the
103 GCC 3.3 distribution, sort.c compiled with GCC 2.95.4 and running on
104 Debian 3.0r1 GNU/Linux, 2.4GHz Pentium 4, single pass with no
105 temporary files and plenty of RAM.
107 Since comparisons seem to be the bottleneck, perhaps the best
108 algorithm to try next should be merge insertion. See Knuth section
109 5.3.1, who credits Lester Ford, Jr. and Selmer Johnson, American
110 Mathematical Monthly 66 (1959), 387-389.
112 Remove suspicious uses of alloca (ones that may allocate more than
115 Adapt these contribution guidelines for coreutils:
116 http://sources.redhat.com/automake/contribute.html
118 Improve test coverage.
119 See HACKING for instructions on generating an html test coverage report.
120 Find a program that has poor coverage and improve.
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 dd: consider adding an option to suppress `bytes/block read/written'
136 output to stderr. Suggested here:
137 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=165045
139 Pending copyright papers:
140 ------------------------
141 getpwnam from Bruce Korb
143 pb (progress bar) from Miika Pekkarinen
145 ------------------------------
147 Remove long-deprecated options. Search case-insensitive for
148 `deprecated' and `remove in '. Automate this.
150 Add a distcheck-time test to ensure that every distributed
151 file is either read-only(indicating generated) or is
152 version-controlled and up to date.
154 remove `%s' notation (now that they're all gone, add a maint.mk sc_
155 rule to ensure no new ones are added):
156 grep -E "\`%.{,4}s'" src/*.c
158 remove all uses of the `register' keyword: Done. add a maint.mk rule
161 remove or adjust chown's --changes option, since it
162 can't always do what it currently says it does.
164 Support arbitrary-precision arithmetic in those tools for which it
165 makes sense. Factor and expr already support this via libgmp.
166 The "test" program is covered via its string-based comparison of
167 integers. To be converted: seq.
169 Adapt tools like wc, tr, fmt, etc. (most of the textutils) to be
170 multibyte aware. The problem is that I want to avoid duplicating
171 significant blocks of logic, yet I also want to incur only minimal
172 (preferably `no') cost when operating in single-byte mode.
174 pr's use of nstrftime can make it malloc a very large (up to SIZE_MAX) buffer
178 Copyright (C) 2002-2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
180 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
181 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
182 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
183 (at your option) any later version.
185 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
186 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
187 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
188 GNU General Public License for more details.
190 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
191 along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.