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 Beware: some are quite old and no longer valid.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:
18 Suggestion from Paul Eggert:
19 More generally, there's not that much use for imaxtostr nowadays,
20 since the inttypes module and newer versions of gettext allow things
21 like _("truncating %s at %" PRIdMAX " bytes") to work portably.
22 I suspect that (if someone cares to take the time) we can remove
23 all instances of imaxtostr and umaxtostr in coreutils and gnulib.
25 cp --recursive: use fts and *at functions to perform directory traversals
26 in source and destination hierarchy rather than forming full file names.
27 The latter (current) approach fails unnecessarily when the names
28 become very long, and requires space and time that is quadratic in the
29 depth of the hierarchy. [Bo Borgerson is working on this]
32 Now that gnulib supports *printf("%a"), import one of the
33 *printf-posix modules so that printf(1) will support %a even on
34 platforms where the native *printf(3) is deficient.
35 Suggestion from Eric Blake.
37 consider adding some implementation of the "col" utility
38 Suggested by Karl Berry.
40 renice: POSIX utility, needs implementing.
41 suggestion from Karl Berry (among others).
42 Bob Proulx is working on this.
45 Address this comment: FIXME: mv's behavior in this case is system-dependent
46 Better still: fix the code so it's *not* system-dependent.
48 ls: add --format=FORMAT option that controls how each line is printed.
50 copy.c: Address the FIXME-maybe comment in copy_internal.
51 And once that's done, add an exclusion so that 'cp --link'
52 no longer incurs the overhead of saving src. dev/ino and dest. filename
55 Write an autoconf test to work around build failure in HPUX's 64-bit mode.
56 See notes in README -- and remove them once there's a work-around.
58 Integrate use of sendfile, suggested here:
59 http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-fileutils/2003-03/msg00030.html
60 I don't plan to do that, since a few tests demonstrate no significant benefit.
62 printf: consider adapting builtins/printf.def from bash
64 tail: don't use xlseek; it *exits*.
65 Instead, maybe use a macro and return nonzero.
67 tr: support nontrivial equivalence classes, e.g. [=e=] with LC_COLLATE=fr_FR
69 lib/strftime.c: Since %N is the only format that we need but that
70 glibc's strftime doesn't support, consider using a wrapper that
71 would expand /%(-_)?\d*N/ to the desired string and then pass the
72 resulting string to glibc's strftime.
74 unexpand: [http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/unexpand.html]
75 printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 8,9 should print its input, unmodified.
76 printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 5,8 should print "x\ty\n"
78 sort: Investigate better sorting algorithms; see Knuth vol. 3.
80 We tried list merge sort, but it was about 50% slower than the
81 recursive algorithm currently used by sortlines, and it used more
82 comparisons. We're not sure why this was, as the theory suggests it
83 should do fewer comparisons, so perhaps this should be revisited.
84 List merge sort was implemented in the style of Knuth algorithm
85 5.2.4L, with the optimization suggested by exercise 5.2.4-22. The
86 test case was 140,213,394 bytes, 426,4424 lines, text taken from the
87 GCC 3.3 distribution, sort.c compiled with GCC 2.95.4 and running on
88 Debian 3.0r1 GNU/Linux, 2.4GHz Pentium 4, single pass with no
89 temporary files and plenty of RAM.
91 Since comparisons seem to be the bottleneck, perhaps the best
92 algorithm to try next should be merge insertion. See Knuth section
93 5.3.1, who credits Lester Ford, Jr. and Selmer Johnson, American
94 Mathematical Monthly 66 (1959), 387-389.
96 shred: Update shred as described here to conform to DoD 5220 rules:
97 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-05/msg00075.html
99 Remove suspicious uses of alloca (ones that may allocate more than
102 Adapt these contribution guidelines for coreutils:
103 http://sources.redhat.com/automake/contribute.html
105 Improve test coverage.
106 See HACKING for instructions on generating an html test coverage report.
107 Find a program that has poor coverage and improve.
109 Changes expected to go in, someday.
110 ======================================
112 dd patch from Olivier Delhomme
114 test/mv/*: clean up $other_partition_tmpdir in all cases
116 ls: when both -l and --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir are
117 specified, consider whether to let the latter select whether to
118 dereference command line symlinks to directories. Since -l has
119 an implicit --NO-dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir meaning.
120 Pointed out by Karl Berry.
122 dd: consider adding an option to suppress 'bytes/block read/written'
123 output to stderr. Suggested here:
124 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=165045
126 Pending copyright papers:
127 ------------------------
128 getpwnam from Bruce Korb
130 pb (progress bar) from Miika Pekkarinen
132 ------------------------------
134 Remove long-deprecated options. Search case-insensitive for
135 'deprecated' and 'remove in '. Automate this.
137 Add a distcheck-time test to ensure that every distributed
138 file is either read-only(indicating generated) or is
139 version-controlled and up to date.
141 remove '%s' notation (now that they're all gone, add a maint.mk sc_
142 rule to ensure no new ones are added):
143 grep -E "\`%.{,4}s'" src/*.c
145 remove all uses of the 'register' keyword: Done. add a maint.mk rule
148 remove or adjust chown's --changes option, since it
149 can't always do what it currently says it does.
151 Support arbitrary-precision arithmetic in those tools for which it
152 makes sense. Factor and expr already support this via libgmp.
153 The "test" program is covered via its string-based comparison of
154 integers. To be converted: seq.
156 Adapt tools like wc, tr, fmt, etc. (most of the textutils) to be
157 multibyte aware. The problem is that I want to avoid duplicating
158 significant blocks of logic, yet I also want to incur only minimal
159 (preferably 'no') cost when operating in single-byte mode.
161 pr's use of nstrftime can make it malloc a very large (up to SIZE_MAX) buffer
165 Copyright (C) 2002-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
167 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
168 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
169 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
170 (at your option) any later version.
172 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
173 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
174 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
175 GNU General Public License for more details.
177 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
178 along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.