[arch-dev-public] [signoff] coreutils 6.11-1

[Andreas Radke]

each coreutils release is known to have regressions. so please test it
carefully. it's in testing for both arches.

-Andy

GNU coreutils NEWS                                    -*- outline -*-

* Noteworthy changes in release 6.11 (2008-04-19) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  configure --enable-no-install-program=groups now works.

  "cp -fR fifo E" now succeeds with an existing E.  Before this fix, using
  -fR to copy a fifo or "special" file onto an existing file would fail
  with EEXIST.  Now, it once again unlinks the destination before trying
  to create the destination file.  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.90]

  dd once again works with unnecessary options like if=/dev/stdin and
  of=/dev/stdout.  [bug introduced in fileutils-4.0h]

  id now uses getgrouplist, when possible.  This results in
  much better performance when there are many users and/or groups.

  ls no longer segfaults on files in /proc when linked with an older version
  of libselinux.  E.g., ls -l /proc/sys would dereference a NULL pointer.

  md5sum would segfault for invalid BSD-style input, e.g.,
  echo 'MD5 (' | md5sum -c -  Now, md5sum ignores that line.
  sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.1.0]

  md5sum -c would accept a NUL-containing checksum string like "abcd\0..."
  and would unnecessarily read and compute the checksum of the named file,
  and then compare that checksum to the invalid one: guaranteed to fail.
  Now, it recognizes that the line is not valid and skips it.
  sha1sum, sha224sum, sha384sum, and sha512sum are affected, too.
  [bug present in the original version, in coreutils-4.5.1, 1995]

  "mkdir -Z x dir" no longer segfaults when diagnosing invalid context "x"
  mkfifo and mknod would fail similarly.  Now they're fixed.

  mv would mistakenly unlink a destination file before calling rename,
  when the destination had two or more hard links.  It no longer does that.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-5.3.0]

  "paste -d'\' file" no longer overruns memory (heap since coreutils-5.1.2,
  stack before then) [bug present in the original version, in 1992]

  "pr -e" with a mix of backspaces and TABs no longer corrupts the heap
  [bug present in the original version, in 1992]

  "ptx -F'\' long-file-name" would overrun a malloc'd buffer and corrupt
  the heap.  That was triggered by a lone backslash (or odd number of them)
  at the end of the option argument to --flag-truncation=STRING (-F),
  --word-regexp=REGEXP (-W), or --sentence-regexp=REGEXP (-S).

  "rm -r DIR" would mistakenly declare to be "write protected" -- and
  prompt about -- full DIR-relative names longer than MIN (PATH_MAX, 8192).

  "rmdir --ignore-fail-on-non-empty" detects and ignores the failure
  in more cases when a directory is empty.

  "seq -f % 1" would issue the erroneous diagnostic "seq: memory exhausted"
  rather than reporting the invalid string format.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-6.0]

** New features

  join now verifies that the inputs are in sorted order.  This check can
  be turned off with the --nocheck-order option.

  sort accepts the new option --sort=WORD, where WORD can be one of
  general-numeric, month, numeric or random.  These are equivalent to the
  options --general-numeric-sort/-g, --month-sort/-M, --numeric-sort/-n
  and --random-sort/-R, resp.

** Improvements

  id and groups work around an AFS-related bug whereby those programs
  would print an invalid group number, when given no user-name argument.

  ls --color no longer outputs unnecessary escape sequences

  seq gives better diagnostics for invalid formats.

** Portability

  rm now works properly even on systems like BeOS and Haiku,
  which have negative errno values.

** Consistency

  install, mkdir, rmdir and split now write --verbose output to stdout,
  not to stderr.