new snapshot available: coreutils-6.10.169-a1a0b

[Jim Meyering]

I expect to make a release as soon as autoconf-2.62 is released.
As such, this snapshot was bootstrapped with the very latest
autoconf and automake (and as usual, up-to-the-minute gnulib).

There has been a little churn in gnulib, surrounding some nice new strtod
tests from Eric Blake.  Some of those exercise a bug that is present even
in your favorite distro's very latest glibc package (fixed in upstream
CVS just a couple days ago), so are disabled.  So, if you see a new
strtod-related test failure, suspect your strtod implementation.

coreutils snapshot:
  http://meyering.net/cu/coreutils-ss.tar.gz        8.8 MB
  http://meyering.net/cu/coreutils-ss.tar.lzma      3.6 MB
  http://meyering.net/cu/coreutils-ss.tar.gz.sig
  http://meyering.net/cu/coreutils-ss.tar.lzma.sig
aka
  http://meyering.net/cu/coreutils-6.10.169-a1a0b.tar.gz
  http://meyering.net/cu/coreutils-6.10.169-a1a0b.tar.lzma

Changes since the previous snapshot:

Jim Meyering (12):
      avoid failure of new test on kernel without SELinux support
      * NEWS: Note the dd bug fix.  The bug was introduced over 8 years ago:
      "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly prompt about very long names
      Begin documenting contribution guidelines.
      * README-contribution-guidelines: Mention how to amend a commit.
      Emit "#line 1" right after the two 'read-only/GENERATED' lines.
      printf doc: xref print(3) and libc's "Output Conversion Syntax" node
      texinfo formatting tweaks
      root tests: Set NON_ROOT_USERNAME if not set already.
      Avoid root-only SELinux-related test failures w/o mcstransd.
      * bootstrap: Remove dangling symlinks from lib (aka $source_base), too.
      bootstrap: make find's -depth option be the first.

Paul Eggert (1):
      dd bug fix: accept e.g., if=/dev/stdin and of=/dev/stdout


Here's the current state of NEWS:

----------------------------
GNU coreutils NEWS                                    -*- outline -*-

* Noteworthy changes in release 6.?? (2008-??-??) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.

  dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
  of=/dev/stdout.  [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]

  id now uses getgrouplist, when possible.  This results in
  much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.

  ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
  of libselinux.  E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.

  "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
  mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly.  Now they're fixed.

  mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
  when the destination had two or more hard links.  It no longer does that.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

  "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
  stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]

  "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
  the heap.  That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
  at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
  --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).

  "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
  prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).

  "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
  in more cases when a directory is empty.

  "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
  rather than reporting the invalid string format.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]

** New features

  join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order.  This check can
  be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.

  sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
  general-numeric, month, numeric or random.  These are equivalent to the
  options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
  and --random-sort/-R, resp.

** Improvements

  id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
  would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.

  ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences

  seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.

** Portability

  rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
  which have negative errno values.

** Consistency

  install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
  not to stderr.


* Noteworthy changes in release 6.10 (2008-01-22) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  Fix a non-portable use of sed in configure.ac.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.92]


* Noteworthy changes in release 6.9.92 (2008-01-12) [beta]

** Bug fixes

  cp --parents no longer uses uninitialized memory when restoring the
  permissions of a just-created destination directory.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]

  tr's case conversion would fail in a locale with differing numbers
  of lower case and upper case characters.  E.g., this would fail:
  env LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO-8859-1 tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.9.90]

** Improvements

  "touch -d now writable-but-owned-by-someone-else" now succeeds
  whenever that same command would succeed without "-d now".
  Before, it would work fine with no -d option, yet it would
  fail with the ostensibly-equivalent "-d now".