path: root/TODO

If you're interested in helping, here are some tasks that we've considered
over the years.  Beware: some are quite old and no longer valid.  To avoid
wasting your time by duplicating work or by working on a task that is no
longer pertinent, please search the mailing list and post your intent
before embarking on a big project.

==================================================
document the following in coreutils.texi:
  runcon
  chcon
  mktemp
  [
  pinky
  uptime
Also document the SELinux changes.

comm: add an option, --output-delimiter=STR
  Files to change: src/comm.c, ChangeLog, NEWS, doc/coreutils.texi,
  Add a new file, tests/misc/comm (use another file in that directory as
  a template), to exercise the new option.  Suggestion from Dan Jacobson.

printf:
  Now that gnulib supports *printf("%a"), import one of the
  *printf-posix modules so that printf(1) will support %a even on
  platforms where the native *printf(3) is deficient.
  Suggestion from Eric Blake.

renice: POSIX utility, needs implementing.
  suggestion from Karl Berry (among others).
  Bob Proulx is working on this.

install: add an option to specify the program used to strip binaries.
  suggestion from Karl Berry

doc/coreutils.texi:
  Address this comment: FIXME: mv's behavior in this case is system-dependent
  Better still: fix the code so it's *not* system-dependent.

ls: add --format=FORMAT option that controls how each line is printed.

cp --no-preserve=X should not attempt to preserve attribute X
  reported by Andreas Schwab

copy.c: Address the FIXME-maybe comment in copy_internal.
And once that's done, add an exclusion so that `cp --link'
no longer incurs the overhead of saving src. dev/ino and dest. filename
in the hash table.

See if we can be consistent about where --verbose sends its output:
  These all send --verbose output to stdout:
    head, tail, rm, cp, mv, ln, chmod, chown, chgrp, install, ln
  These send it to stderr:
    shred mkdir split
  shred must write --verbose output to stderr
  readlink is different

Write an autoconf test to work around build failure in HPUX's 64-bit mode.
See notes in README -- and remove them once there's a work-around.

Integrate use of sendfile, suggested here:
  http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-fileutils/2003-03/msg00030.html
I don't plan to do that, since a few tests demonstrate no significant benefit.

Should printf '\0123' print "\n3"?
  per report from TAKAI Kousuke on Mar 27
  http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2003-03/index.html

printf: consider adapting builtins/printf.def from bash

df: add `--total' option, suggested here http://bugs.debian.org/186007

seq: give better diagnostics for invalid formats:
   e.g. no or too many % directives
seq: consider allowing format string to contain no %-directives

tail: don't use xlseek; it *exits*.
  Instead, maybe use a macro and return nonzero.

tr: support nontrivial equivalence classes, e.g. [=e=] with LC_COLLATE=fr_FR

lib/strftime.c: Since %N is the only format that we need but that
  glibc's strftime doesn't support, consider using a wrapper that
  would expand /%(-_)?\d*N/ to the desired string and then pass the
  resulting string to glibc's strftime.

unexpand: [http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007908799/xcu/unexpand.html]
  printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 8,9 should print its input, unmodified.
  printf 'x\t \t y\n'|unexpand -t 5,8 should print "x\ty\n"

Let GNU su use the `wheel' group if appropriate.
  (there are a couple patches, already)

sort: Investigate better sorting algorithms; see Knuth vol. 3.

  We tried list merge sort, but it was about 50% slower than the
  recursive algorithm currently used by sortlines, and it used more
  comparisons.  We're not sure why this was, as the theory suggests it
  should do fewer comparisons, so perhaps this should be revisited.
  List merge sort was implemented in the style of Knuth algorithm
  5.2.4L, with the optimization suggested by exercise 5.2.4-22.  The
  test case was 140,213,394 bytes, 426,4424 lines, text taken from the
  GCC 3.3 distribution, sort.c compiled with GCC 2.95.4 and running on
  Debian 3.0r1 GNU/Linux, 2.4GHz Pentium 4, single pass with no
  temporary files and plenty of RAM.

  Since comparisons seem to be the bottleneck, perhaps the best
  algorithm to try next should be merge insertion.  See Knuth section
  5.3.1, who credits Lester Ford, Jr. and Selmer Johnson, American
  Mathematical Monthly 66 (1959), 387-389.

cp --recursive: perform dir traversals in source and dest hierarchy rather
  than forming full file names.  The latter (current) approach fails
  unnecessarily when the names become very long.

Remove suspicious uses of alloca (ones that may allocate more than
   about 4k)

Adapt these contribution guidelines for coreutils:
  http://sources.redhat.com/automake/contribute.html


Changes expected to go in, someday.
======================================

  dd patch from Olivier Delhomme

  test/mv/*: clean up $other_partition_tmpdir in all cases

  ls: when both -l and --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir are
  specified, consider whether to let the latter select whether to
  dereference command line symlinks to directories.  Since -l has
  an implicit --NO-dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir meaning.
  Pointed out by Karl Berry.

  A more efficient version of factor, and possibly one that
  accepts inputs of size 2^64 and larger.

  dd: consider adding an option to suppress `bytes/block read/written'
  output to stderr.  Suggested here:
    http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=165045

  Pending copyright papers:
  ------------------------
  ls --color: Ed Avis' patch to suppress escape sequences for
    non-highlighted files

  getpwnam from Bruce Korb

  pb (progress bar) from Miika Pekkarinen

  ------------------------------

Remove long-deprecated options.  Search case-insensitive for
`deprecated' and `remove in '.  Automate this.

Add a distcheck-time test to ensure that every distributed
file is either read-only(indicating generated) or is
version-controlled and up to date.

Implement Ulrich Drepper's suggestion to use getgrouplist rather
  than getugroups.  This affects only `id', but makes a big difference
  on systems with many users and/or groups, and makes id usable once
  again on systems where access restrictions make getugroups fail.
  But first we'll need a run-test (either in an autoconf macro or at
  run time) to avoid the segfault bug in libc-2.3.2's getgrouplist.
  In that case, we'd revert to using a new (to-be-written) getgrouplist
  module that does most of what `id' already does.  Or just avoid the
  buggy use of getgrouplist by never passing it a buffer of length zero.
  See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=200327

remove `%s' notation (now that they're all gone, add a Makefile.maint sc_
    rule to ensure no new ones are added):
  grep -E "\`%.{,4}s'" src/*.c

remove all uses of the `register' keyword: Done.  add a Makefile.maint rule
  for this, too.

remove or adjust chown's --changes option, since it
  can't always do what it currently says it does.

Adapt tools like wc, tr, fmt, etc. (most of the textutils) to be
  multibyte aware.  The problem is that I want to avoid duplicating
  significant blocks of logic, yet I also want to incur only minimal
  (preferably `no') cost when operating in single-byte mode.

pr's use of nstrftime can make it malloc a very large (up to SIZE_MAX) buffer

ls.c: use gettime rather than clock_gettime, gettimeofday, time

-----

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