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 Beware: some are quite old and no longer valid.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.
41 Address this comment: FIXME: mv's behavior in this case is system-dependent
42 Better still: fix the code so it's *not* system-dependent.
44 ls: add --format=FORMAT option that controls how each line is printed.
46 copy.c: Address the FIXME-maybe comment in copy_internal.
47 And once that's done, add an exclusion so that 'cp --link'
48 no longer incurs the overhead of saving src. dev/ino and dest. filename
51 Write an autoconf test to work around build failure in HPUX's 64-bit mode.
52 See notes in README -- and remove them once there's a work-around.
54 Integrate use of sendfile, suggested here:
55 http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-fileutils/2003-03/msg00030.html
56 I don't plan to do that, since a few tests demonstrate no significant benefit.
58 printf: consider adapting builtins/printf.def from bash
60 tail: don't use xlseek; it *exits*.
61 Instead, maybe use a macro and return nonzero.
63 tr: support nontrivial equivalence classes, e.g. [=e=] with LC_COLLATE=fr_FR
65 lib/strftime.c: Since %N is the only format that we need but that
66 glibc's strftime doesn't support, consider using a wrapper that
67 would expand /%(-_)?\d*N/ to the desired string and then pass the
68 resulting string to glibc's strftime.
70 unexpand: [http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/unexpand.html]
71 printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 8,9 should print its input, unmodified.
72 printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 5,8 should print "x\ty\n"
74 sort: Investigate better sorting algorithms; see Knuth vol. 3.
76 We tried list merge sort, but it was about 50% slower than the
77 recursive algorithm currently used by sortlines, and it used more
78 comparisons. We're not sure why this was, as the theory suggests it
79 should do fewer comparisons, so perhaps this should be revisited.
80 List merge sort was implemented in the style of Knuth algorithm
81 5.2.4L, with the optimization suggested by exercise 5.2.4-22. The
82 test case was 140,213,394 bytes, 426,4424 lines, text taken from the
83 GCC 3.3 distribution, sort.c compiled with GCC 2.95.4 and running on
84 Debian 3.0r1 GNU/Linux, 2.4GHz Pentium 4, single pass with no
85 temporary files and plenty of RAM.
87 Since comparisons seem to be the bottleneck, perhaps the best
88 algorithm to try next should be merge insertion. See Knuth section
89 5.3.1, who credits Lester Ford, Jr. and Selmer Johnson, American
90 Mathematical Monthly 66 (1959), 387-389.
92 shred: Update shred as described here to conform to DoD 5220 rules:
93 http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-05/msg00075.html
95 Remove suspicious uses of alloca (ones that may allocate more than
98 Adapt these contribution guidelines for coreutils:
99 http://sources.redhat.com/automake/contribute.html
101 Improve test coverage.
102 See HACKING for instructions on generating an html test coverage report.
103 Find a program that has poor coverage and improve.
105 Changes expected to go in, someday.
106 ======================================
108 dd patch from Olivier Delhomme
110 test/mv/*: clean up $other_partition_tmpdir in all cases
112 ls: when both -l and --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir are
113 specified, consider whether to let the latter select whether to
114 dereference command line symlinks to directories. Since -l has
115 an implicit --NO-dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir meaning.
116 Pointed out by Karl Berry.
118 Pending copyright papers:
119 ------------------------
120 getpwnam from Bruce Korb
122 pb (progress bar) from Miika Pekkarinen
124 ------------------------------
126 Remove long-deprecated options. Search case-insensitive for
127 'deprecated' and 'remove in '. Automate this.
129 Add a distcheck-time test to ensure that every distributed
130 file is either read-only(indicating generated) or is
131 version-controlled and up to date.
133 remove '%s' notation (now that they're all gone, add a maint.mk sc_
134 rule to ensure no new ones are added):
135 grep -E "\`%.{,4}s'" src/*.c
137 remove all uses of the 'register' keyword: Done. add a maint.mk rule
140 remove or adjust chown's --changes option, since it
141 can't always do what it currently says it does.
143 Support arbitrary-precision arithmetic in those tools for which it
144 makes sense. Factor and expr already support this via libgmp.
145 The "test" program is covered via its string-based comparison of
146 integers. To be converted: seq.
148 Adapt tools like wc, tr, fmt, etc. (most of the textutils) to be
149 multibyte aware. The problem is that I want to avoid duplicating
150 significant blocks of logic, yet I also want to incur only minimal
151 (preferably 'no') cost when operating in single-byte mode.
153 pr's use of nstrftime can make it malloc a very large (up to SIZE_MAX) buffer
157 Copyright (C) 2002-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
159 This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
160 it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
161 the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
162 (at your option) any later version.
164 This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
165 but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
166 MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
167 GNU General Public License for more details.
169 You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
170 along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.