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coreutils-8.7 released [stable]

Item posted by Jim Meyering <meyering> on Sat 13 Nov 2010 05:53:53 PM UTC.

This is to announce coreutils-8.7, a stable, bug-fix-only release.

It's been a month since coreutils-8.6 with 37 change-sets in coreutils
proper and 59 in gnulib. This was supposed to have been a snap release
solely to revert the stat %[XYZ] time stamp handling change introduced
in 8.6, but that ended up requiring many more rounds than expected,
and in the mean time a few other bugs and portability problems were
exposed and fixed. We encourage anyone who is using coreutils-8.6 to
upgrade as soon as possible, in order to minimize the chance that new
application code relies on the stat format string semantics of 8.6.
See NEWS below for a summary.

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

Thanks to all who have been contributing, helping to manage
the mailing list and reporting bugs.

Jim [on behalf of the coreutils maintainers]

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:
http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v8.7
or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory:
git shortlog v8.6..v8.7

To summarize the many gnulib-related changes, run these commands from
a git-cloned coreutils directory:
git checkout v8.7
git submodule summary v8.6

Here are the compressed sources:
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.7.tar.gz   (11MB)
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.7.tar.xz   (4.5MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]:
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.7.tar.gz.sig
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-8.7.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-8.7.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 000BEEEE

and rerun the `gpg --verify' command.

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
Autoconf 2.68.8-89ce5
Automake 1.11a
Gnulib v0.0-4439-ga14bd22
Bison 2.4.3

./NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 8.7 (2010-11-13) [stable]

** Bug fixes

cp, install, mv, and touch no longer crash when setting file times
on Solaris 10 Update 9 [Solaris PatchID 144488 and newer expose a
latent bug introduced in coreutils 8.1, and possibly a second latent
bug going at least as far back as coreutils 5.97]

csplit no longer corrupts heap when writing more than 999 files,
nor does it leak memory for every chunk of input processed
[the bugs were present in the initial implementation]

tail -F once again notices changes in a currently unavailable
remote directory [bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]

** Changes in behavior

cp --attributes-only now completely overrides --reflink.
Previously a reflink was needlessly attempted.

stat's %X, %Y, and %Z directives once again print only the integer
part of seconds since the epoch. This reverts a change from
coreutils-8.6, that was deemed unnecessarily disruptive. To obtain
a nanosecond-precision floating point time stamp for %X use %.X;
if you want (say) just 3 fractional digits, use %.3X. Likewise
for %Y and %Z.

stat's new %W format directive would print floating point seconds.
However, with the above change to %X, %Y and %Z, we've made %W work
the same way as the others.