+sort: Investigate better sorting algorithms; see Knuth vol. 3.
+
+ We tried list merge sort, but it was about 50% slower than the
+ recursive algorithm currently used by sortlines, and it used more
+ comparisons. We're not sure why this was, as the theory suggests it
+ should do fewer comparisons, so perhaps this should be revisited.
+ List merge sort was implemented in the style of Knuth algorithm
+ 5.2.4L, with the optimization suggested by exercise 5.2.4-22. The
+ test case was 140,213,394 bytes, 426,4424 lines, text taken from the
+ GCC 3.3 distribution, sort.c compiled with GCC 2.95.4 and running on
+ Debian 3.0r1 GNU/Linux, 2.4GHz Pentium 4, single pass with no
+ temporary files and plenty of RAM.
+
+ Since comparisons seem to be the bottleneck, perhaps the best
+ algorithm to try next should be merge insertion. See Knuth section
+ 5.3.1, who credits Lester Ford, Jr. and Selmer Johnson, American
+ Mathematical Monthly 66 (1959), 387-389.
+
+Remove suspicious uses of alloca (ones that may allocate more than
+ about 4k)
+
+Adapt these contribution guidelines for coreutils:
+ http://sources.redhat.com/automake/contribute.html
+
+Improve test coverage.
+ See HACKING for instructions on generating an html test coverage report.
+ Find a program that has poor coverage and improve.
+
+Changes expected to go in, someday.
+======================================
+
+ dd patch from Olivier Delhomme
+
+ test/mv/*: clean up $other_partition_tmpdir in all cases
+
+ ls: when both -l and --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir are
+ specified, consider whether to let the latter select whether to
+ dereference command line symlinks to directories. Since -l has
+ an implicit --NO-dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir meaning.
+ Pointed out by Karl Berry.
+
+ dd: consider adding an option to suppress `bytes/block read/written'
+ output to stderr. Suggested here:
+ http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=165045
+
+ Pending copyright papers:
+ ------------------------
+ getpwnam from Bruce Korb
+
+ pb (progress bar) from Miika Pekkarinen
+
+ ------------------------------
+
+Remove long-deprecated options. Search case-insensitive for
+`deprecated' and `remove in '. Automate this.
+
+Add a distcheck-time test to ensure that every distributed
+file is either read-only(indicating generated) or is
+version-controlled and up to date.
+
+remove `%s' notation (now that they're all gone, add a maint.mk sc_
+ rule to ensure no new ones are added):
+ grep -E "\`%.{,4}s'" src/*.c
+
+remove all uses of the `register' keyword: Done. add a maint.mk rule
+ for this, too.
+
+remove or adjust chown's --changes option, since it
+ can't always do what it currently says it does.
+
+Support arbitrary-precision arithmetic in those tools for which it
+makes sense. Factor and expr already support this via libgmp.
+The "test" program is covered via its string-based comparison of
+integers. To be converted: seq.
+
+Adapt tools like wc, tr, fmt, etc. (most of the textutils) to be
+ multibyte aware. The problem is that I want to avoid duplicating
+ significant blocks of logic, yet I also want to incur only minimal
+ (preferably `no') cost when operating in single-byte mode.
+
+pr's use of nstrftime can make it malloc a very large (up to SIZE_MAX) buffer
+
+-----
+
+Copyright (C) 2002-2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
+
+This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
+it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
+the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
+(at your option) any later version.
+
+This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
+but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
+MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
+GNU General Public License for more details.