Plans for findutils 4.3.x

[James Youngman]

Hello all,

As you will have noticed, findutils 4.2.26 was recently released and
was mainly a bugfix release.  For some time now I have been trying to
stabilise the 4.2.x releases, prioritising bugfixes and avoiding large
changes.

However, a large change has been waiting in the wings for quite a
while now; this is a change to use fts() to search the filesystem.
The principal benefits we get out of this are greater simplicity and
the ability to search deeper directory hierarchies.  However, this is
too large a change to put into findutils 4.2.x.  

So, I have now incorporated all the bugfixes made in the 4.2.x
released into the trunk, and also merged the fts changes into the CVS
trunk.  Soon, there will be parallel 4.2.x and 4.3.x releases.  The
4.2.x releases favour stability over enhancement, and the 4.3.x
releases will contain the larger changes which are too risky to put
into 4.2.x.  I will, as far as possible, try to keep the findutils
test suite identical between the two branches, to ensure that there is
no unexpected divergence of functionality.  

The 4.3.x releases will be made to alpha.gnu.org only, for the time
being.  I encourage people to test them, but won't represent them as
yet being stable or production-ready.  The 4.2.x releases will be made
to ftp.gnu.org, as before.  I suppose that there may be occasional
4.2.x pre-releases on alpha,gnu.org, but if this happens they will be
clearly labelled as being pre-releases.  I think that covers what you
should expect to see on the FTP sites.

As for what you should now see in the CVS repository, the 4.2.x code
will be maintained on the 'rel-4-2-fixes' branch, as in fact has been
the case for some time now.  The 4.3.x code will be maintained on the
CVS trunk.  The 4.3.x code already includes the switch to using the
fts() implementation from gnulib.  Many thanks to Jim Meyering for his
help with this.

Regards,
James.