GNU Help Wanted - People at Savannah: View a Job
enhancements wanted for findutils for GNU Help Wanted
Category: Developer
Submitter: toby
Date: Fri 08 Jan 2010 02:03:37 PM UTC
Status: Deleted
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Development Status: 1 - Planning
Details (job description, contact ...):
This project is a collection of enhancements to findutils to make it more useful and improve compatibility with other similar tools.
This project would be mentored by the findutils maintainers. Consult the mailing list -email is unavailable- for more details.
1. Improvements to updatedb and locate (naturally, with accompanying documentation):
(a) Enhance locate to understand the database format used by slocate (it already understands two formats ans is dsigned in such a way that a third should be reasonably easy). Implement the security-checking functionality that slocate applies.
(b) Implement a replacement for the current updatedb shell script which does pretty much the same thing but is less ugly.
(c) This task may also include (b) - add updatedb functionality to traverse the filesystem as root, preserving enough permission
information to allow us to provide the same functinality as slocate. Use the same database format as slocate unless there is a reason not to.
2. Improvements to find:
(a) Add tests which allow [acm]time to be compared against a
specified timestamp, as opposed to the timestamp of a file (-newer) or an age (-mtime). Add relevant tests to the test suite and document.
(b) Instrument find to allow us to improve the guesses that parser.c makes for struct predicate->est_success_rate. Measure the performance increase (or lack of it) in find 4.3.x with optimisation turned on
3. Improvements to xargs:
(a) Implement an optional feature in which xargs figures out how long a command line it can pass to exec() without necessarily believing ARG_MAX (because for example with the Linux kernel this can be an underestimate). Do this efficiently.
Required Skills:
| Skill | Level | Experience |
|---|---|---|
| GNU Coding Standards | Base Knowledge | < 6 Months |
| C | Good Knowledge | 6 Mo - 2 yr |
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