freebsd-dev/contrib/gnu-sort/TODO

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restore djgpp, eventually
merge TODO lists
add unit tests for lib/*.c
strip: 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.
implement --target-directory=DIR for install (per texinfo documentation)
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
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
m4: rename all macros that start with AC_ to start with another prefix
resolve RH report on cp -a forwarded by Tim Waugh
Martin Michlmayr's patch to provide ls with `--sort directory' option
tail: don't use xlseek; it *exits*.
Instead, maybe use a macro and return nonzero.
add mktemp? Suggested by Nelson Beebe
df: alignment problem of `Used' heading with e.g., -mP
reported by Karl Berry
tr: support nontrivial equivalence classes, e.g. [=e=] with LC_COLLATE=fr_FR
fix tail -f to work with named pipes; reported by Ian D. Allen
$ mkfifo j; tail -f j & sleep 1; echo x > j
./tail: j: file truncated
./tail: j: cannot seek to offset 0: Illegal seek
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.
sort: Compress temporary files when doing large external sort/merges.
This improves performance when you can compress/uncompress faster than
you can read/write, which is common in these days of fast CPUs.
suggestion from Charles Randall on 2001-08-10
sort: Add an ordering option -R that causes 'sort' to sort according
to a random permutation of the correct sort order. Also, add an
option --random-seed=SEED that causes 'sort' to use an arbitrary
string SEED to select which permutations to use, in a deterministic
manner: that is, if you sort a permutation of the same input file
with the same --random-seed=SEED option twice, you'll get the same
output. The default SEED is chosen at random, and contains enough
information to ensure that the output permutation is random.
suggestion from Feth AREZKI, Stephan Kasal, and Paul Eggert on 2003-07-17
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.
tail --p is now ambiguous
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, post-5.2.1:
======================================
wc: add an option, --files0-from [as for du] to make it read NUL-delimited
file name arguments from a file.
dd patch from Olivier Delhomme
Apply Andreas Gruenbacher's ACL and xattr changes
Apply Bruno Haible's hostname changes
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.
Re-add a separate test for du's stack space usage (like the one removed
from tests/rm/deep-1).
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
Look into improving the performance of md5sum.
`openssl md5' is consistently about 30% faster than md5sum on an idle
AMD 2000-XP system with plenty of RAM and a 261 MB input file.
openssl's md5 implementation is in assembly, generated by a perl script.