GNU sed 4.2 released

[Paolo Bonzini]

A new version of GNU sed has been released at

   ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/sed/sed-4.2.tar.gz
   ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/sed/sed-4.2.tar.bz2

This is the first stable release of GNU sed to adopt version 3 of the
GNU General Public License.  It is also the first release to use gnulib
to achieve maximum portability.

Thanks to Hideo AOKI, Paul Eggert, Bruno Haible, Jim Meyering, Corinna
Vinschen, Ralf Wildenhues, Matthew Woehlke for contributing to and
testing this release.


New features:

* added a new extension `z` to clear pattern space even in the presence
of invalid multibyte sequences

* new option --follow-symlinks, available when editing a file in-place.
This option may not be available on some systems (in this case, the
option will *not* be a no-op; it will be completely unavailable).
In the future, the option may be added as a no-op on systems without
symbolic links at all, since in this case a no-op is effectively
indistinguishable from a correct implementation.

* hold-space is reset between different files in -i and -s modes.

* much improved portability

* much faster in UTF-8 locales

* will correctly replace ACLs when using -i

* will now accept NUL bytes for `.'


Bug fixes:

* multibyte processing fixed

* fixed bug in 'i\' giving a segmentation violation if given alone.


Caveats:

* a preexisting GNU gettext installation is needed in order to compile
GNU sed with NLS support

* the following GNU extensions are now turned off by --posix: options
[iImMsSxX] in the `s' command, address kinds `FIRST~STEP' and `ADDR1,+N'
and `ADDR1,~N', line address 0, `e' or `z' commands, text between an `a'
or `c' or `i' command and the following backslash, arguments to the `l'
command.  --posix also disables all extensions to regular expressions.