On 23 December 2010 04:20, Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org> wrote:
Upstream update. Mostly a bug fix release to fix issues with sort.
I removed "ac_cv_func_openat=no" from the configure line as that seems to be a work-around needed for a very old version of coreutils building under fakeroot, perhaps with an old glibc. Given we no longer build under fakeroot, that should not be needed. I believe the original issue was with a bug in "rm -r" and that still works, so hopefully this is all good... Also, the test suite still passes. If anyone can remember the exact details of why this was needed, it would be good to check I have not caused a regression here.
Signoff both.
Upstream NEWS:
* Noteworthy changes in release 8.8 (2010-12-22) [stable]
** Bug fixes
cp -u no longer does unnecessary copying merely because the source has finer-grained time stamps than the destination.
od now prints floating-point numbers without losing information, and it no longer omits spaces between floating-point columns in some cases.
sort -u with at least two threads could attempt to read through a corrupted pointer. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
sort with at least two threads and with blocked output would busy-loop (spinlock) all threads, often using 100% of available CPU cycles to do no work. I.e., "sort < big-file | less" could waste a lot of power. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
sort with at least two threads no longer segfaults due to use of pointers into the stack of an expired thread. [bug introduced in coreutils-8.6]
sort --compress no longer mishandles subprocesses' exit statuses, no longer hangs indefinitely due to a bug in waiting for subprocesses, and no longer generates many more than NMERGE subprocesses.
sort -m -o f f ... f no longer dumps core when file descriptors are limited.
** Changes in behavior
sort will not create more than 8 threads by default due to diminishing performance gains. Also the --parallel option is no longer restricted to the number of available processors.
** New features
split accepts the --number option to generate a specific number of files.
Signoff x86_64. -- Guillaume