GNU Core Utilities - News: coreutils-8.17 released [stable]

coreutils-8.17 released [stable]

Item posted by Jim Meyering <meyering> on Thu 10 May 2012 07:35:05 PM UTC.

This is to announce coreutils-8.17, a stable release.
There have been 53 commits by 9 people in the 6 weeks since 8.16.
The changes are small and all seem safe.

See the NEWS below for a brief summary.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
The following people contributed changes to this release:

  Andreas Schwab (1)
  Bernhard Voelker (2)
  Bruce Korb (1)
  Jim Meyering (38)
  Karl Berry (1)
  Kevin Lyda (1)
  Paul Eggert (4)
  Pádraig Brady (4)
  Stefano Lattarini (1)

Jim [on behalf of the coreutils maintainers]
==================================================================

Here is the GNU coreutils home page:
    http://gnu.org/s/coreutils/

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
  http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v8.17
or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git shortlog v8.16..v8.17

To summarize the 126 gnulib-related changes, run these commands
from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git checkout v8.17
  git submodule summary v8.16

Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.17.tar.xz
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.17.tar.xz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/coreutils/coreutils-8.17.tar.xz
  http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/coreutils/coreutils-8.17.tar.xz.sig

[*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify coreutils-8.17.tar.xz.sig

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then run this command to import it:

  gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 7FD9FCCB000BEEEE

and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.69.1-2d4eb
  Automake 1.12a
  Gnulib v0.0-7375-ga3a0496
  Bison 2.5.834-2eeb1

==================================================================
NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.17 (2012-05-10) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  id and groups, when invoked with no user name argument, would print
  the default group ID listed in the password database, and sometimes
  that ID would be neither real nor effective.  For example, when run
  set-GID, or in a session for which the default group has just been
  changed, the new group ID would be listed, even though it is not
  yet effective. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.1]

  cp S D is no longer subject to a race: if an existing D were removed
  between the initial stat and subsequent open-without-O_CREATE, cp would
  fail with a confusing diagnostic saying that the destination, D, was not
  found.  Now, in this unusual case, it retries the open (but with O_CREATE),
  and hence usually succeeds.  With NFS attribute caching, the condition
  was particularly easy to trigger, since there, the removal of D could
  precede the initial stat.  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

  split --number=C /dev/null no longer appears to infloop on GNU/Hurd
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.8]

  stat no longer reports a negative file size as a huge positive number.
  [bug present since 'stat' was introduced in fileutils-4.1.9]

** New features

  split and truncate now allow any seekable files in situations where
  the file size is needed, instead of insisting on regular files.

  fmt now accepts the --goal=WIDTH (-g) option.

  stat -f recognizes new file system types: bdevfs, inodefs, qnx6

** Changes in behavior

  cp,mv,install,cat,split: now read and write a minimum of 64KiB at a time.
  This was previously 32KiB and increasing to 64KiB was seen to increase
  throughput by about 10% when reading cached files on 64 bit GNU/Linux.

  cp --attributes-only no longer truncates any existing destination file,
  allowing for more general copying of attributes from one file to another.