GNU Core Utilities - News: coreutils-8.5 released [stable]

coreutils-8.5 released [stable]

Item posted by Jim Meyering <meyering> on Fri 23 Apr 2010 05:04:42 PM UTC.

This is to announce coreutils-8.5, a bug-fix-only "stable" release.

This is a good time for a release.
It's been over three months, during which we've seen a few bug fixes.
In addition, a few features are nearly ready, and it is good to
get a stable release out before adding those to the mix.

Here's the GNU Coreutils home page, in case you're wondering what it is:
    http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/

Thanks to everyone else who has been contributing, helping to manage
the mailing list and reporting bugs.

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
  http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v8.5
or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git shortlog v8.4..v8.5

To summarize the many gnulib-related changes, run these commands from
a git-cloned coreutils directory:
  git checkout v8.5
  git submodule summary v8.4

Here are the compressed sources:
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.5.tar.gz   (11  MB)
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.5.tar.xz   (4.4 MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.5.tar.gz.sig
  http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.5.tar.xz.sig

To reduce load on the main server, use a mirror listed at:
  http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

[*] You can use either of the above signature files 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-8.5.tar.gz.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 B9AB9A16

and rerun the `gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.65.57-45695
  Automake 1.11a
  Gnulib v0.0-3828-g6d126a8
  Bison 2.4.1

./NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.5 (2010-04-23) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  cp and mv once again support preserving extended attributes.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.4]

  cp now preserves "capabilities" when also preserving file ownership.

  ls --color once again honors the 'NORMAL' dircolors directive.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.11]

  sort -M now handles abbreviated months that are aligned using blanks
  in the locale database.  Also locales with 8 bit characters are
  handled correctly, including multi byte locales with the caveat
  that multi byte characters are matched case sensitively.

  sort again handles obsolescent key formats (+POS -POS) correctly.
  Previously if -POS was specified, 1 field too many was used in the sort.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-7.2]

** New features

  join now accepts the --header option, to treat the first line of each
  file as a header line to be joined and printed unconditionally.

  timeout now accepts the --kill-after option which sends a kill
  signal to the monitored command if it's still running the specified
  duration after the initial signal was sent.

  who: the "+/-" --mesg (-T) indicator of whether a user/tty is accepting
  messages could be incorrectly listed as "+", when in fact, the user was
  not accepting messages (mesg no).  Before, who would examine only the
  permission bits, and not consider the group of the TTY device file.
  Thus, if a login tty's group would change somehow e.g., to "root",
  that would make it unwritable (via write(1)) by normal users, in spite
  of whatever the permission bits might imply.  Now, when configured
  using the --with-tty-group[=NAME] option, who also compares the group
  of the TTY device with NAME (or "tty" if no group name is specified).

** Changes in behavior

  ls --color no longer emits the final 3-byte color-resetting escape
  sequence when it would be a no-op.

  join -t '' no longer emits an error and instead operates on
  each line as a whole (even if they contain NUL characters).

This message also appears here:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.coreutils.announce/59